Reading Hollywood: Spaces and Meanings in American Film

by Deborah Thomas

Overview

This book examines the treatment of space and narrative in a selection of classic films including My Darling Clementine, It's a Wonderful Life, and Vertigo. Deborah Thomas employs a variety of arguments in exploring the reading of space and its meaning in Hollywood cinema and film generally. Topics covered include the importance of space in defining genre (such as the necessity of an urban landscape for a gangster film to be a gangster film); the ambiguity of offscreen space and spectatorship (how an audience reads an unseen but inferred setting), and the use of spatially disruptive cinematic techniques such as flashback to construct meaning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781903364017
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	06/13/2001
Series:	Short Cuts
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Deborah Thomas is reader in film studies at the University of Sunderland, UK and a member of the editorial board of Movie.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Settings: Geography, Architecture, Decor
2. Dramaturgical Spaces: Onstage and Offstage, Public and Private
3. Cinematic Spaces: Background and Foreground, Onscreen and Offscreen
4. The Space of the Spectator: Diegetic and Non—Diegetic, Virtual and Real
Conclusion
Filmography
Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

Reynold Humphries

It would be difficult to propose, in the context of an introduction to Classical Hollywood, a more precise and rigorous study.... This book deserves to become essential for undergraduate courses.

— Reynold Humphries, University of Lille III

Editorial Reviews

Among the finest introductions to Hollywood in particular and film studies in general

Robin Wood

It would be difficult to propose, in the context of an introduction to Classical Hollywood, a more precise and rigorous study.

Reynold Humphries