Syllabus
Title: HOLLYWOOD/EUROPE: A TRANSNATIONAL FILM CULTURE
Coordinator: DR. RICHARD NOWELL
Contact: richard_nowell@hotmail.com
Time: Every Second Wednesday 17:00 - 20:00 Central European Time [11 October; 25 October; 8 November; 22 November; 6 December; 20 December] - a ten-minute break will be built into this session.
Location: Room B 216, Jinonice
Follow-up: I am available to talk about anything related to this course following the conclusion of each seminar. I am also available to discuss points at any time by email or on Zoom, with a swift response ensured.
Moodle Registration: Please enrol yourselves on this course's moodle page as soon as possible. Here is the link: https://dlcv.cuni.cz/course/view.php?id=493
COURSE OUTLINE
Part 1: Hollywood ≠ Europe (?)
The first two sessions will challenge the notion that Hollywood is a solely American institution, and thus distinct from Europe.
Session 1 (11 October)
Hollywood ≠ Europe I:
Nation & Culture - or why Hollywood is seen as American
This session starts to lay a foundation for the remainder of the course, by considering how people have assigned national status tends to cultural artifacts like films. While respecting that this multifaceted phenomena is an important part of film culture, students will be invited to question the various forms of logic that have underpinned it. In so doing, we can begin to move on from asking whether or not certain films are "American" or "Czech", and instead ask how various cultural stake-holders such as filmmakers, marketers, critics, and audiences make use of the notion of such a thing as an "American film" or a "European film". This session will enable us better to understand why Hollywood is - somewhat reductively - considered to be simply an American institution.
Targeted Learning Outcomes
Students are expected to develop a criticial understanding of: 1. The different ways stakeholders assign national status to cultural artefacts like films. 2. the ways filmmakers invite audiences to see their films as examples of national cinema. 3. how we can use these ideas to explain why stakeholders tend to think of Hollywood as American.
Preparation
Reading
Higson,36-46. 1. What THREE ways does Higson suggest cultural products like films were – and are – assigned national status in everyday life? 2. What is the FOURTH “new” way Higson suggests that we might also think about film in terms of national status?
Screening: The Artist (2011) 1. Do you feel you are watching an American film? if so, why? if not, why not? 2. Do you feel you are watching a European film? If so, why? If not, why not? 3. Are you uncomfortable using these categories, if so why? and how do you categorize the film in a different way?
Session 2 (25 October)
Hollywood ≠ Europe II:
Transatlantic Hollywood - or why Hollywood is more than American
Because the study of Hollywood and Europe involves consideration of cross-border flows, it requires an appreciation of the concept of transnational cinema - a multifaceted notion that relates to who makes movies, what those movies are about, who they address, where they circulate, who actually watches them, and how they are watched. Accordingly, this session considers the ways in which border-crossings expose the limitations of the concept of the national, and how in turn the concept of the transnational opens up new ways of seeing cultural production, cultural products, and reception cultures. In doing so, we will confront a key issue underwriting the course as a whole: Hollywood and Europe are more deeply intertwined than often thought.
Targeted Learning Outcomes
Students are expected to develop a criticial understanding of: 1. how the composition of Hollywood complicates its status as an American institution. 2. how subject matter, themes, and modes of address complicate the American status of Hollywood films. 3. How European consumption of Hollywood output complicates Hollywood’s American status.
Preparation
Readings
Behlil, 27-38. 1. What are the two main ways Behlill approaches a definition of Hollywood? 2. How are the American credentials of Hollywood complicated by the nationalities of the companies and people involved in the institution of Hollywood?
Meers, 158-174 1. What did Meers’ interviewees think about a) Hollywood films, about b) European cinema, and about c) Flemish cinema? 2. How do their responses complicate the consumption-based approach to national cinema?
Screening: Midnight in Paris (2011) 1. How does this film depict international flows of people, goods, capital, and ideas? 2. What roles does internationally circulating culture play in the lives of the characters? 3. How does the film encourage audiences to view the roles of popular culture – like the film itself - in their own lives?
Part II: Hollywood Cinema vs. European Cinema
Sessions 3 and 4 will challenge the notion that Hollywood's output and that associated with European nations is profoundly different; a notion that rests on the invocation on the one hand of mindless entertainment, and on the other enlightening art.
Session 3 (8 November)
Hollywood vs. European Cinema I: Hollywood’s Art Cinema
This and the following session challenge a deeply rooted distinction that continues to be drawn across Film Studies and Western film cultures: that Hollywood and European Cinema are not just separate but binarily opposed entities. Thus, where Hollywood tends to be characterized as a purveyor formulaic, stupefying trash, European cinema is usually elevated to the status of sophisticated and enlightening Art Cinema. This session does so by considering the institutionalization within Hollywood of Art(y) cinema. By this is meant output that is heavily indebted to celebrated European productions that came to be seen in and beyond American film culture as "European Art Cinema". Students will also focus primarily on the historical dimensions of this part of Hollywood’s repertoire, from the emergence of the post-war Art Cinema and foreign-language market, to the establishment in the early 1980s of Hollywood "classics divisions", through to the institutionalization in Hollywood of boutique or specialty films aimed at an internationally scattered cultural bourgeoisie.
Targeted Learning Outcomes
Students are expected to develop a criticial understanding of: 1. the imagined binaries between Hollywood cinema and “European cinema” 2. the characteristics of the art cinema model usually associated with Europe. 3. the extent to which Hollywood has been involved in handling films that use the “European” art cinema model
Preparation
Readings
Bordwell, 94-102. 1. What does Bordwell suggest is the general relationship between what he calls “Art Cinema” and “Hollywood cinema”? 2.What does Bordwell suggest are the key characteristics of “Art Cinema”?
Screening: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) 1. How does this film borrow from what Bordwell describes as “European Art Cinema”? 2. How does this film use what we might think of as standard Hollywood conventions? 3. What do you think this film is trying to tell us? 4. Why do you think this film looks the way it does?
Session 4 (22 November) ZOOM SESSION 12:00-13:50Join Zoom Meetinghttps://ciee.zoom.us/j/83713858532?pwd=RmxlUG5JdjRhRE5KK0d4amRCa0lJQT09Meeting ID: 837 1385 8532Passcode: 170647
Hollywood vs. European Cinema II
Mid-Atlanticism and Imperso-Nation
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Annotation
Distinctions between a supposedly American Hollywood and a supposedly separate "European cinema" represent something of a founding myth of Film Studies and myriad film cultures around the world. However, such a distinction masks the degree to which transatlantic flows of capital, people, ideas, and products have generated myriad interconnections between the two.
Accordingly, this course offers insights into the relations between Hollywood and Europe, by seeking to complicate three discourses underpinning discussions of this topic. First, that Hollywood is an American institution, and as such is separate from Europe.
Second, that Hollywood cinema and European cinema are fundamentally different - even binarily opposed - entities. Third, that the dissemination of Hollywood cinema in Europe represents an effort both to impose a "foreign" culture onto an overseas territory.
Students will therefore consider the extent to which Europeans have been a part of the structures of Hollywood, the stylistic exchanges linking "Hollywood" and "European" films, and the ways Hollywood has geared images of Europe and Europeans to targeted audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. In so doing, students are invited to develop their critical understandings of issues pertaining to cultural imperialism, Americanization, globalization, and the national.