The emulation of Hollywood by German films studios in the 1930s caused significant problems from an ideological perspective. “Germanized” Hollywood productions incorporated the exciting elements that made American films so popular in the Third Reich in an effort to displace them. However, a glorification of consumer capitalism and political individualism accompanied Californian style assembly-line filmmaking, even in Nazi Germany. In particular, Hollywood style stardom, western films and remakes introduced potentially dissonant ideas and messages into Germany’s public sphere. These films broke the rules and depicted worlds that subtly questioned Nazi ideology in their depiction of non-Nazi modes of identity. “Germanized” Hollywood deviated from Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’s attempts to reconstruct the cinema as a location of indoctrination. The presence of American social values in German films resulted in a mixed articulation of “Germanness” in the regime’s preferred medium of propagandistic persuasion.

Linking the images of stars as contrasting as Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe, and Gloria Swanson, and uniting genres like romantic comedy, film noir, and melodrama, the figure of the narcissistic woman stands as a versatile, ever-present extra- and intra-diegetic force in the dream factory of classical Hollywood. She is, in fact, the lead in what sociologist Edgar Morin conceptualizes in The Stars (1957) as a golden-age “myth of love”: Calling upon the psychic and sensory investment of her fans with her otherworldly aura and material impact, the female star emerges as both the active subject of romantic narratives and the admired on-screen partner in a love affair with the spectator. Like Ovid's original Narcissus before her, the narcissistic woman of Hollywood exists, as Morin describes it, to “focus…love's magic on [herself].” Contemporary film theory, however, has interpreted the star not as a subjective force in this dialogical “magic” between actress and spectator but rather as the product of a patriarchal system of filmmaking, one that objectifies women both on the screen and in the audience. In an effort to further analyze the questions of identity and representation evoked by the female star and her audience, this thesis will seek an alternative to the binaries that tend to characterize the traditional understanding of women in classic Hollywood (that is, spectator/star, narcissistic subject/idealized object; male/female, active/passive). Rather than read narcissism as a one-dimensional, monologic preoccupation with one's image, this research posits that classic cinematic representations of the woman's relationship to the self invite an examination of the existential complexity of a figure negotiating the registers of corporeal reality and ethereal ideality, star persona and diegetic character. In the hopes of highlighting the active engagements – between star and role; spectator, actress, and filmic form itself – inspired by these cinematic entities and their “myths of love,” this work will connect psychoanalytic concerns with Edgar Morin's cultural history of Hollywood, Laura U. Marks's theory of haptic visuality, and the phenomenological understanding of film outlined by Vivian Sobchack in an exploration of the embodied subjectivities borne by the on-screen Narcissus and her off-screen audience.

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I följande text avser jag att analysera Man of Tai Chi och undersöka förhållandet mellan Kina och Hollywood. Kina blir en alltmer viktig marknad för filmbolag från Hollywood och hur de förhåller sig till varandra på film.Kung fu-filmens spridning har inneburit andra kulturella uttryck, från Bruce Lee som symbol mot imperialistiskt förtryck i tredje världen, till att bidra med formande av nya bildsspråk i filmer som The Matrix. Hur kan en transnationell samproduktion mellan kinesiska och västerländska bolag se ut? I följande uppsats undersöker jag produktionsförhållanden och mottagande av filmen Man of Tai Chi och i slutsatsen kommer jag fram till att filmen misslyckats ur ett kommersiellt perspektiv.

In this dissertation I study Ball Cancelled, Summer Indoors and La tajada, the three early screenplays by Argentine writer Manuel Puig, who wrote these before his first novel and dismissing “copies of old movies”. My thesis investigates and refutes this harsh self-judgment and tries to show—through theories of the “copy” —, that the three screenplays establish a dialogue with one another as well as with the “old Hollywood movies”, through a subtle critique, a transgressive distance and complacency towards the model they represent. The first section examines Puig’s relationship to the conditions under which they were composed, and those films produced in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, in particular those classified as melodramas and “women’s films” under the genre system of that time, as well as with movie reception and the theories elaborated around the audiences, especially the female spectator. The second section is dedicated to the analysis of the three screenplays, from their conception as films to be made under the “Hollywood system” to their impossibility to adherence to the models required by that system, since they reelaborate and alter them, sometimes subtly, and on occassions openly. These three screenplays permit a comprehensive understanding of Puig's narrative, which is why they should be integrated as autonomous texts in the complete works of Manuel Puig.

The central goal of this thesis is to resituate the development of film noir within the context of the Hollywood studio system that created it. I argue that under the ‘factory’ conditions of the studio’s working environment, a distaste fermented from the screenwriter class that burrowed in the pulp fiction, particularly hard-boiled mystery fiction, of the era. This strain of literature was eventually coupled with the panache of Hollywood style to form a filmic style which was noteworthy for its ability to use Hollywood stylistics to screen a vision of life that was antithetical to that which the studio system wanted to offer to the mass public. I have also attempted to situate the original and most crystallized noir moment in the mid-1940s as part of the continuum of American cinema where the stylistic traces of noir were present prior to that period, and certainly after, but never more coherently than at that moment in the 1940s. I have assembled sources ranging from published interview collections, memoirs, biographies, film criticism and archival collections to develop my argument about the literary, filmic and cultural evolution of film noir in Hollywood.

Proefschrift Universiteit van Amsterdam. / Met lit. opg. - Met samenvatting in het Nederlands.

Proefschrift Universiteit van Amsterdam. / Met lit. opg. Samenvatting in het Nederlands.

Univ., Diss.--Mainz, 2004.

Thesis--Tübingen. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 150-158).