The American Abroad: The Imperial Gaze in Postwar Hollywood Cinema

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Drawing on cinema and media studies, art history, American studies, and postcolonial studies, this innovative book offers a fresh way of thinking about Hollywood film aesthetics. It explores how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western colonial formations of vision influenced classical Hollywood film style, and thus provides a new and unique perspective on the origins of the cinematic gaze. Classical Hollywood cinema constructs global spaces as an imaginative dreamworld, subsuming geographical and cultural differences into utopian fantasy. Yet, this characteristically Hollywoodian aesthetic has rarely been explored in detail. How are such representations constructed within film texts Is this utopian aesthetic really as uniform and transparent as it appears What is its relationship to the United States status as an imperial power In The American Abroad, Anna Cooper explores how postwar Hollywood cinema adopted elements of British and French imperial visual culture, transforming them to suit a new United Statesian context. Cooper argues that four visual discourses in particularthe sublime, the ethnographic, the picturesque, and glamourbecame building blocks in the development of a new American visual language.

Reviews

In this eloquent and erudite exploration of an imperial Hollywood that framed and edited images of Europe for domestic consumption, Anna Cooper forensically shows the reader how to follow an untrustworthy tour guide. * Peter Stanfield, Emeritus Professor of Film, University of Kent, UK *
The American Abroad offers a detailed and complex view of American imperialism using the institution of Hollywood cinema for fostering cultural dominance over Europe. Anna Cooper foregrounds the figure of the tourist to unravel in nuanced detail just how Hollywoods utopian aesthetics outrageously depicts Europe as its Orientalist Other on screen. With rich textual analyses of a specific corpus of Post-War films set in Europe, The American Abroad forms an important contribution to the renewed interest in Transatlantic cinematic encounters. * Jeroen Gerrits, Associate Professor in Comparative Literature, Binghamton University (SUNY), USA and author of Cinematic Skepticism: Across Digital and Global Turns *
The American Abroad addresses the complex ideological relationship between the U.S. and Europe through a lively and attentive analysis of postwar Hollywood cinemas visual strategies. By illuminating the ways that the dream factory imagined a Europe that exists primarily for the white traveler, Coopers study contributes to a richer understanding of U.S. imperialism and its cinematic narratives. * Peter Limbrick, Professor of Film and Digital Media, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA and author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi and Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the US, Australia, and New Zealand *

Author Bio

Anna Cooper is Assistant Professor in the School of Theatre, Film, and Television, University of Arizona, USA. She completed her PhD at the University of Warwick and has worked at the universities of Hertfordshire, Sussex, and California (Santa Cruz). She co-edited Projecting the World: Representing the Foreign in Classical Hollywood (2017).