The persistence of Hollywood / by Thomas Elsaesser.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Flashback: of objects of love and objects of study. Film studies in Britain: cinephilia, screen theory and cultural studies -- The name for a pleasure that has no substitute: Vincente Minnelli -- All the lonely places: the heroes of Nicholas Ray -- Sam Fuller's productive pathologies: the hero as (his own best) enemy -- Cinephilia: or the uses of disenchantment -- Genius of the system. The persistence of Hollywood, Part I: the continuity principle -- Why Hollywood? -- Narrative cinema and audience aesthetics: the mise-en-scáene of the spectator -- Film as system: or how to step through an open door -- Gangsters and grapefruits: the public enemy -- Studio and genre: auteurs maudits, mavericks and eminent Europeans. -- Transatlantic triangulations: William Dieterle and the Warner Bros biopics -- Welles and virtuosity: Citizen Kane as character-mask -- The dandy in Hitchcock -- Too big and too close: Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang -- Robert Altman's Nashville: putting on the show -- Stanley Kubrick's prototypes: the author as world-maker -- Genie out of the bottle: the return of the system as auteur? -- The pathos of failure: notes on the unmotivated hero -- Auteur cinema and the new economy Hollywood -- The love that never dies: Francis Ford Coppola and Bram Stoker's Dracula -- The blockbuster as time machine -- Auteurism today: signature products, concept-authors and access for all: Avatar -- The persistence of Hollywood. Digital Hollywood: between truth, belief and trust -- The persistence of Hollywood, Part II: reflexivity, feedback and self-regulation.

Examines various paradigms for reading Hollywood and its cinema. This volume also explores a range of topics from cinephilia and auteurs - Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, among others - to melodrama, digital cinema, and even time- travel films.