The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960

By Kristin Thompson, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, et al.

Book Overview

'A dense, challenging and important book.' Philip French Observer

'At the very least, this blockbuster is probably the best single volume history of Hollywood we're likely to get for a very long time.' Paul Kerr City Limits

'Persuasively argued, the book is also packed with facts, figures and photographs.' Nigel Andrews Financial Times

Acclaimed for their breakthrough approach, Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson analyze the basic conditions of American film-making as a historical institution and consider to what extent Hollywood film production constitutes a systematic enterprise, in both its style and its business operations.

Despite differences of director, genre or studio, most Hollywood films operate within a set of shared assumptions about how a film should look and sound. Such assumptions are neither natural nor inevitable; but because classical-style films have been the type most widely seen, they have come to be accepted as the 'norm' of film-making and viewing.

The authors show how these classical conventions were formulated and standardized, and how they responded to the arrival of sound, colour, widescreen ratios and stereophonic sound. They argue that each new technological development has served a function within an existing narrational system.

The authors also examine how the Hollywood cinema standardized the film-making process itself. They describe how, over the course of its history, Hollywood developed distinct modes of production in a constant search for maximum efficiency, predictability and novelty.

Set apart by its combination of theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, this book is the standard work on the classical Hollywood cinema style of film-making from the silent era to the 1960s. Now available in paperback, it is a 'must' for film students, lecturers and all those seriously interested in the development of the film industry.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231060548
• ISBN13: 9780231060547
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 506 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A classic

Probably the only book of this sort; ambitious as it is informative, well written and wide in the scope of research; a true classic in the field of cinema history... Obligatory reading for all who want to understand, study or write about American cinema; BOTH classical and contemporary, the book is also useful to other students of cinema...

a very interesting study of classical hollywood

I love old movies. They have some kind of magic that sadly I can't find in movies today. What this book does is to study the classical years- The classical narrative and how the system, style and people made together these classical movies. The starting point of this book is that almost all of the movies from 1917 to 1960 have the same elements, the same style- the style that today we all referring to when we think of hollywood- the way the story goes, the technical making (filming, editing) that tries to stay unseen and more. The authors choose 100 films from these years,almost all of them are not famous ones or films that made special impact, but films that were made out of the system. Out of these films they show the reader how the hollywood style make us blind to the technical elements and to the similarity of them- because although the norms changed all the time by films that broke the old norms- they all have similar basis. This book is very interesting and I recommend it to everyone who wants to learn more about classical hollywood from the films themselves. The only complaint I have (and it's refering to the edition I read, which is from 1985)) is that the pages are divided to columns and it makes the reading a little uneasy, but still worth the reading.