Hollywood Aesthetic

Projections ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-55
Author(s):  
Todd Berliner
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Intrinsic Properties ◽  
Aesthetic Design ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Affective Processes ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Hollywood Movies

Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema investigates the Hollywood film industry’s chief artistic accomplishment: providing aesthetic pleasure to mass audiences. Grounded in film history and supported by research in psychology and philosophical aesthetics, the book explains (1) the intrinsic properties characteristic of Hollywood cinema that induce aesthetic pleasure; (2) the cognitive and affective processes, sparked by Hollywood movies, that become engaged during aesthetic pleasure; and (3) the exhilarated aesthetic experiences afforded by an array of persistently entertaining Hollywood movies. Hollywood Aesthetic addresses four fundamental components of Hollywood’s aesthetic design—narrative, style, ideology, and genre—aiming for a comprehensive appraisal of Hollywood cinema’s capacity to excite aesthetic pleasure. This article outlines the book’s main points and themes. As a précis, it is heavy on ideas and light on evidence, which is to be found in the book itself.

Hollywood Aesthetic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Berliner
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Film History ◽  
Mass Scale ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Large Populations ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
Artistic Achievement ◽  
Entertainment Value

Hollywood makes the most widely successful pleasure-giving artworks the world has ever known. The American film industry operates under the assumption that pleasurable aesthetic experiences, among large populations, translate into box office success. More than any other historical mode of art, Hollywood has systematized the delivery of aesthetic pleasure, packaging and selling it on a mass scale. If the Hollywood film industry succeeds in delivering aesthetic pleasure both routinely and, at times, in an outstanding way, then we should ultimately regard Hollywood cinema as an artistic achievement, not merely a commercial success. Hollywood Aesthetic accounts for the chief attraction of Hollywood cinema worldwide: its entertainment value. The book addresses four fundamental components of Hollywood’s aesthetic design: narrative, style, ideology, and genre. Grounded in film history and in the psychological and philosophical literature in aesthetics, the book explains: (1) the intrinsic properties characteristic of Hollywood cinema that induce aesthetic pleasure; (2) the cognitive and affective processes, sparked by Hollywood movies, that become engaged during aesthetic pleasure; and (3) the exhilarated aesthetic experiences afforded by an array of persistently entertaining Hollywood movies. Offering a comprehensive appraisal of the capacity of Hollywood cinema to provide aesthetic pleasure, the book sets out to explain how Hollywood creates, for masses of people, some of their most exhilarating experiences of art.

The Hollywood Aesthetic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Berliner
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Hedonic Value ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Cognitive Challenge ◽  
Do So

Chapter 1 explains Hollywood’s general principles for creating aesthetic pleasure for mass audiences. The chapter introduces the book’s two main theses: (1) Hollywood cinema targets an area, between boredom and confusion, that is optimally pleasing for mass audiences. It seeks to offer enough cognitive challenge to sustain aesthetic interest but not so much that it would jeopardize a film’s hedonic value or cause average spectators to give up the search for understanding. (2) Many of the Hollywood films that offer exhilarating aesthetic experiences beyond a single encounter and over extended periods operate near the boundaries of classicism, veering into areas of novelty and complexity that more typical Hollywood films avoid; however, they do so without sacrificing a mass audience’s ability to cope with the challenge. Such films take risks, and exhilarated pleasure results when they seem on the verge of overburdening or displeasing spectators in some bold and extraordinary way.

Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema

Projections ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-101
Author(s):  
Todd Berliner
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Research ◽  
Film Analysis ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
The Relationship

In this reply to four commentaries on my book, Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema, I address several conceptual and methodological issues raised by the respondents. Those issues include the book’s focus on aesthetic pleasure; the functions of narrative, style, ideology, and genre in Hollywood cinema; the relationship between ideology and aesthetics; the use of scientific research in the humanities; normative aesthetic evaluations; real versus hypothetical spectators; and the practices of aesthetic film analysis.

Goldilocks Aesthetics

Projections ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-74
Author(s):  
James E. Cutting
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Responses ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure

Much of aesthetics is based in psychological responses. Yet seldom have such responses—couched in empirically based psychological terms—played a central role in the discussion of movie aesthetics. Happily, Todd Berliner’s Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema does just that. This commentary discusses some history and some twists and turns behind Berliner’s analysis.

Speculating about Spectatorship

Projections ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-80
Author(s):  
Janet Staiger
Keyword(s):  
American Cinema ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure

Todd Berliner’s Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema (2017) offers useful broad theoretical arguments about how to understand our pleasures in viewing cinema. Yet, moving to individual cases requires recognizing the historical conditions of spectatorship including contemporaneous ideological issues, levels and types of knowledges, and cooperation (or non-cooperation) by a spectator.

scholarly journals Rewriting the stars: Surface tensions and gender troubles in the online media production of digital deepfakes

2021 ◽  
pp. 135485652110294
Author(s):  
Christopher Holliday
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
Film History ◽  
Stanley Kubrick ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Digital Asset ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Film Stars ◽  
Star Performers ◽  
Sophisticated Technology

This article examines a cross-section of viral Deepfake videos that utilise the recognisable physiognomies of Hollywood film stars to exhibit the representative possibilities of Deepfakes as a sophisticated technology of illusion. Created by a number of online video artists, these convincing ‘mash-ups’ playfully rewrite film history by retrofitting canonical cinema with new star performers, from Jim Carrey in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) to Tom Cruise in American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000). The particular remixing of stardom in these videos can – as this article contends – be situated within the technological imaginary of ‘take two’ cinephilia, and the ‘technological performativity of digitally remastered sounds and images’ in an era of ‘the download, the file swap, [and] the sampling’ (Elsaesser 2005: 36–40). However, these ‘take two’ Deepfake cyberstars further aestheticize an entertaining surface tension between coherency and discontinuity, and in their modularity function as ‘puzzling’ cryptograms written increasingly in digital code. Fully representing the star-as-rhetorical digital asset, Deepfakes therefore make strange contemporary Hollywood’s many digitally mediated performances, while the reskinning of (cisgender white male) stars sharpens the ontology of gender as it is understood through discourses of performativity (Butler 1990; 2004). By identifying Deepfakes as a ‘take two’ undoing, this article frames their implications for the cultural politics of identity; Hollywood discourses of hegemonic masculinity; overlaps with non-normative subjectivities, ‘body narratives’ and ‘second skins’ (Prosser 1998); and how star-centred Deepfakes engage gender itself as a socio-techno phenomenon of fakery that is produced – and reproduced – over time.

Troubling Masculinities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glen Donnar
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
American History ◽  
War Films ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Media And Politics ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Genre Study

The association of the attacks of 9/11 with Hollywood science fiction and disaster spectacle was immediate and pervasive. Succeeding calls in media and politics for the reassuring return of ‘strong’ masculine types—predominantly drawn from Hollywood westerns, action and war films—were widespread, revealing renewed cultural fears of threats to America from both within and without.Troubling Masculinities is the first dedicated multi-genre study of representations of masculinity in encounters with terror in post-9/11 American cinema. The book examines the impact of “terror-Others”, from Arab terrorists to giant monsters, across a broad range of sub-genres—including disaster melodrama, monster movies, post-apocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and ‘home invasion’ horror, action-thrillers and ‘frontier’ westerns—especially in relation to cinematic representations of masculinity in previous periods of national turmoil. The book demonstrates that the supposed reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across genres. Engaging critical arguments about how Hollywood cinema attempts to resolve male crisis in part through Orientalizing figures of terror, he shows how this unraveling reflects an inability to effectively extinguish the threat or frightening difference of terror. The heroes in these movies are unable to heal themselves or restore order, often becoming as destructive as the threats they encounter. The book concludes by showing how interrelated anxieties about masculinity and nation continue to affect contemporary American cinema and politics. By showing how persistent these cultural fears are, Troubling Masculinities offers an important counternarrative in this supposedly unprecedented moment in American history.

scholarly journals Retro Aesthetics, Affect, and Nostalgia Effects in Recent US-American Cinema: The Cases of La La Land (2016) and The Shape of Water (2017)

Arts ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 87
Author(s):  
Sabine Sielke
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film History ◽  
Social Bonding ◽  
Dominant Mode ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Political Decision Making

Nostalgia and retro are phenomena of modernism and modernization that are currently booming. This goes for political decision-making processes as much as for popular culture where retro aesthetics is the dominant mode of design: Both appear driven by ‘longings for a time that never was.’ While research on nostalgia and retro abound, nostalgia still remains a vague and undertheorized concept seemingly identical with retro. Engaging the ways in which Damien Chazelle’s 2016 movie La La Land and Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water of 2017 produce and interrogate affects, this essay shows how film allows us to make distinctions that the proliferating research on nostalgia and retro often fail to deliver. As we zoom in on how both films reference iconic moments in film history, it becomes evident that retro aesthetics operates in distinctively diverse manners. While La La Land interrogates cinema’s “nostalgia for nostalgia”, The Shape of Water reclaims nostalgia as a mode of social bonding. In this way, both movies foreground how the dynamics of nostalgia, at best, moves forward, not back. Film studies, in turn, can shed considerable light on how both nostalgia and retro work—and why they sell so well.

The Godfather Trilogy

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fran Mason
Keyword(s):  
Francis Ford Coppola ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Auteur Theory ◽  
Italian American ◽  
The Family ◽  
Crime Family ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gangster Films

The Godfather Trilogy forms an important body of work in American cinema, not only because the films, particularly Part I (1972) and Part II (1974), have received acclaim from journalists, critics, and audiences but also because they have received so much attention from academics. The emphasis in the study and appreciation of the trilogy has, however, been on Parts I and II, partly because of their complexity and longevity but also because of how they helped redefine the gangster genre in portraying the Mafia on film, and because of the films’ contributions to the development of New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (all of which have formed important perspectives in academic approaches to the trilogy). Part III (1990) has been felt by critics either to be a disappointment or a coda to the prior incarnations of the series, although it has also attracted academic interest for these very reasons. It is, however, Parts I and II that have served as the main focus of critical attention and not only as gangster films—even if the study of genre has had further influence because their generic revisions introduced the Mafia film. This innovation has produced a range of academic responses that locate the films via reference to histories of organized crime and author Mario Puzo’s representation of the Mafia crime family in the novel on which Parts I and II are based as well as accounts that extend discussion to consider their influence on related representations of the criminal underworld, their impact on popular conceptions of the Mafia, and their representation of Italian-American ethnicity and related areas such as the family and gender. The family has also formed another nexus of connections in criticism because it is so often treated in relation to American culture, and this has also generated a significant body of work on the political and ideological consideration of capitalism in the films. Finally, because Francis Ford Coppola was an important influence in New Hollywood Cinema, there have also been significant considerations of all three films by reference to auteur theory and to Coppola’s balancing of artistic and commercial imperatives.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document