Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

What Ever Happened to Hollywood

2016; Issue: 98 Linguagem: Inglês

2562-2528

Gary Bettinson, Richard Rushton,

Cinema and Media Studies

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In an engaging piece on the transformation of cinema during the 1990s published in 2001, Wheeler Winston Dixon laid bare what were, for him, the 25 Reasons Why It's All Over. (1) His provocation included dismissals of contemporary on the grounds that it now catered only to young teenagers; that it was guided almost exclusively by managers, media conglomerates and marketing; that the pace of editing had gotten hyper-ridiculous; that narrative had collapsed; and perhaps above all that, when watching a film, there was no longer anything to believe in, that all had been reduced to fakery, games, special effects, and smash-ups. We have some sympathy with Dixon's claims while also noting, as does Dixon, the hyperbolic nature of them. those claims reveal, it seems to us, is an inherent difficulty in coming to terms with what has happened to filmmaking since some time around the late 1980s. Some analyses of this period seem to have given up on the stuff of films--their stories, techniques, compositions, and so on--in order to focus on the industry: high concepts, media industry theories, franchises, remakes, and the Jerry Bruckheimer-Michael Bay model of filmmaking. (2) Others have focused on the notion of contemporary special effects attractions, celebrating the decline of narrative and the rise of spectacle-driven, corporeally engaging thrills and spills that have undermined and renegotiated classical Hollywood's relationship to storytelling. (3) Still others have concentrated on the new modes of distribution and exhibition--from TV to DVDs, Blu-rays, online streaming, and so on--that may have rendered cinematic specificity obsolete. (4) Still others have focused more closely on cultural histories, especially those relating to social and political issues in the United States--Ryan and Kellner's Camera Politica marks something of a watershed here (5)--a trend that has continued with a vengeance in the post-9/11 era. All in all, most writers seem to feel the need to identify a definitive break with classical Hollywood--postclassical Hollywood seems the preferred term--summed up nicely by Dixon's feeling that What we are witnessing now is nothing more nor less than the dawn of a new grammar. (6) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] While certainly admitting that a great deal has changed, and also admitting a certain reticence in figuring out when, or if, the current crop of special-effects driven action blockbusters and superhero comic strip films will ever begin to peter out (also noting that we do not wish to denigrate such films; rather, it's simply a matter of accepting that we have little idea of what to make of them), we want to stress that the supposed newness of the new cinematic grammar is not the be-all and end-all of contemporary Hollywood. Rather, and to the contrary, quite a lot of things have stayed the same. In particular, there remain people committed to making good and interesting films according to fairly traditional models. There remain filmmakers who are not very much interested in since the mid-to-late 1980s: Nora Ephron, Ang Lee, and David Fincher. Why these three? They represent, to some extent, filmmakers who have been difficult to place in the overall context of post-1980s Hollywood: Ephron because she resurrected a typically conservative genre, the romantic comedy; Lee because his output is so diverse and his productions transnational; and Fincher because his aesthetic program flouts certain dominant trends in postclassical film style. Ephron Ephron can be charged with being an entirely uninteresting filmmaker: her aesthetic seems more indebted to television the moving and shaking of the media conglomerates or in pitching high concepts. There are also filmmakers who don't believe that filmmaking joins in a conservative-capitalist conspiracy that is dedicated to pulling the wool over the eyes of billions of worldwide passive consumers of media technology in order to ensure the maintenance of the neoliberal status quo. …