Abstract
From the 1930s onwards (with surprisingly few periods of recession considering the potential risks of investment) the Hollywood studio system provided a mass audience with a stream of Westerns, musicals, gangster thrillers, comedies, social problem pictures, and a host of generic variations and cross-breedings. In many ways, this particular system of industrialised mass entertainment has passed its hegemonic heyday, with the rise of television and the record industry. Nevertheless, the aesthetic status of Hollywood and all its works has been such a central issue in the debate on mass culture, in the development of American Studies, and within the history of world cinema, that it constitutes an important case-study of arguments and attitudes.
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Selected Bibliography
Lindsay Anderson, About John Ford (London: Plexus Publishing, 1981).
Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).
John Caughie (ed.), Theories of Authorship (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).
Edward Countryman, ‘Westerns and United States History’, History Today (March 1983) 18–23.
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© 1984 Christopher Brookeman
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Brookeman, C. (1984). Coming to Terms with Hollywood: From Mass to Auteur Theory. In: American Culture and Society since the 1930s. The Contemporary United States. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17567-3_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17567-3_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
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