This dissertation challenges how Hollywood is typically imagined as monolithic, homogenous and homogenising, and separated from other cinemas by fixed and impermeable borders. This influential cinematic paradigm posits a centre-periphery model underpinned by binary oppositions in which most cinemas are negatively defined as Hollywood’s ‘other’ and perceived as fixed in permanent states of opposition and assimilation. It is a perception reinforced by the influential critical paradigm which focuses on the films’ formal stylistic and narrative properties. This conceptualisation ignores, or fails to observe, the larger picture, in which global, national and local cinemas relate to each other in complex and volatile ways. My argument is that a paradigm shift is required in which the main question asked is not ‘What is Hollywood?’ but ‘Where is Hollywood?’ Location is a crux of my argument because it offers a way of questioning the widespread conception of Hollywood as bounded and fixed in a stable cultural landscape. I apply Arjun Appadurai’s framework of disjunctive global cultural flows to the analysis of cinema to show the existence of a more dynamic and chaotic screenscape than is popularly imagined. I also develop a new model of textual analysis involving traces and tracings. This troubles the notion of impermeable borders by finding the traces of global cultural flows within the film frame and tracing their trajectories outside the frame to and from their points of origin and destination. From the creative tensions caused by these asymmetrical and, multidirectional flows a previously unobserved screenscape emerges in which it is possible to see globalising processes as hybridising processes. Within this interpretive framework Hollywood is decentred and can no longer be perceived as fixed and bounded, or as the paradigm by which most cinemas define themselves and are judged. It reveals that heterogeneity and flux rather than homogeneity and fixity characterise intercinematic relations. It shows the existence of porous borders permitting transnational flows. In linking a film’s formal stylistic properties to the disjunctions in the global flows, the new model I develop for textual analysis offers a way of re-imagining Hollywood within the transnational imaginary. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/182527 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Mills, Jane Kathryn, University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, School of Humanities and Languages |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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