Overview: Editorial Review

This comprehensive introduction to Hollywood cinema provides students with a fascinating account of the world's most powerful film industry and its cultural and aesthetic significance. Taking a broad-ranging approach, it explores and interprets Hollywood cinema, in history and in the present, in theory and in practice. Examining films as diverse as Rudolph Valentino's The Son of the Sheik and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Total Recall, this indispensable text provides: an account of the production of movies under the studio system and after, up to the present. an explanation of how the film industry works, including distribution and exhibition. an exploration of Hollywood's place in American culture and in international mass culture. an analysis of the formal properties of Hollywood movies (including space, time, performance and narrative). a chronology of Hollywood cinema.