The American Abroad: The Imperial Gaze in Postwar Hollywood Cinema

Drawing on cinema and media studies, art history, American studies, and postcolonial studies, this innovative book offers a fresh way of thinking about Hollywood film aesthetics. It explores how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western colonial formations of vision influenced classical Hollywood film style, and thus provides a new and unique perspective on the origins of the cinematic gaze. Classical Hollywood cinema constructs global spaces as an imaginative dreamworld,
subsuming geographical and cultural differences into utopian fantasy. Yet, this characteristically Hollywoodian aesthetic has rarely been explored in detail. How are such representations constructed within film texts? Is this utopian aesthetic really as uniform and transparent as it appears? What is its relationship to the United States' status as an imperial power?

In The American Abroad, Anna Cooper explores how postwar Hollywood cinema adopted elements of British and French imperial visual culture, transforming them to suit a new United Statesian context. Cooper argues that four visual discourses in particular-the sublime, the ethnographic, the picturesque, and glamour-became building blocks in the development of a new American visual language.

ISBN-13: 9781501391729

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Publication Date: 10-19-2023

Pages: 216

Product Dimensions: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.46d

Anna Cooper is Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Film, and Television, University of Arizona, USA. She completed her PhD at the University of Warwick and has worked at the universities of Hertfordshire, Sussex, and California (Santa Cruz). She co-edited Projecting the World: Representing the “Foreign” in Classical Hollywood (2017).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Introduction: Cinema, Empire, and the "American Century"

1. The Sublime: Urban Ruins from Nazism to the Cold War

2. The Ethnographic: Imperialist Nostalgia and the American Technological Gaze

3. The Picturesque: Italian Landscape Views and the American Female Gaze

4. Glamour: The Necropolitics of Women's Fashion, from the Bombshell to the Princess

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

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