Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Stuart Henderson, The Hollywood Sequel: History and Form, 1911–2010

2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 58; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/screen/hjx043

1460-2474

Constantine Verevis,

Cinema and Media Studies

Film sequels have long been a mainstay for the Hollywood studios, a trend that continues to the present day, with each of 2016’s three highest-grossing films (in both US domestic and international markets) – Captain America: Civil War, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Finding Dory – in some way extending, or sequelizing, previous properties. Yet despite the ubiquity and market dominance of sequels, it is only in recent years that academic scholarship has turned its attention to such films, notably in works such as Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s Film Sequels (2009) and Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis’s edited collection, Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel (2010), and – relatedly– in edited volumes devoted to other serial properties, including Jennifer Forrest’s The Legend Returns and Dies Harder Another Day: Essays on Film Series (2008) and Claire Perkins and Verevis’s Film Trilogies (2012). Stuart Henderson’s new book, The Hollywood Sequel: History and Form, 1911–2010, joins this list to provide the most comprehensive account of the film sequel to date. Developed from a PhD dissertation undertaken at Warwick University, Henderson’s book seeks to account for the ‘persistent presence’ of Hollywood film sequels, asking three key questions: ... ... At the most basic level […] the cinematic sequel is a film which is defined by a dual form of temporal relationship. The first part of that relationship exists at the formal, or textual, level: the events a sequel portrays occur after the events of a previous film and, even if there is little causal connection between these two sets of events, it is made clear that there is a chronological relationship between them. The second part of that relationship is extratextual. As in the fictional world, the sequel as a film, as an event in the real world, occurs after the original. (p. 5)