Sloan, Anna C. (2013) Imperial Hollywood : American cinematic representations of Europe, 1948-1964. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

This thesis examines the tourist films, a cycle of Hollywood films made between
1948 and 1964 in which an American travels abroad to Europe. The films share an
experience of Europe that is organised around spectacular visual experiences, encounters
with European antiquity – architecture, rituals, foods, older forms of transport – and other
classic aspects of tourist experience. While many scholarly approaches to postwar
Hollywood and its relationship to Europe have focused on industrial and political issues,
this thesis takes a different tack, looking closely at the film text and examining its
representations of European space. I find that these films give a complicated picture of
America’s perceptions of its own rising geopolitical power.
The approach is primarily ideological, investigating how the tourist film texts both
embody and repress various aspects of postwar ideology including imperialism, race and
gender. It accomplishes these ideological readings through the use of strategies adapted
from postcolonial scholarship, including those from literary studies and the visual arts as
well as film studies. I investigate how the tourist films mobilise representational traditions in
colonial art to position America as the new imperial metropole – and Europe, conversely,
as a peripheral space. I thus argue that classical Hollywood cinema, like the 19th-century
British and French novel, must be read as a primary popular art form generated by a
society undergoing a period of expansion and imperial growth.
The tourist films take cues from diverse Hollywood genres. Each chapter is
accordingly structured around the question of how a particular genre is altered or
expanded when the narrative is moved to European space in the postwar context. The
travelogue, film noir, women’s melodrama and musical comedy, I find, each depict Europe
in a very different light, yet in each case the genre’s logic is extended in ways that place
Americans in a position of domination over Europe’s landscape and inhabitants.
Integral to this work is the question of spatiovisual gendered subjectivity – the
differences in how male and female characters (often associated with particular genres)
inhabit, traverse and gaze upon cinematic space. I find that patriarchal and colonial
hegemonies, rather than functioning monolithically together, often contradict and jostle in
complex ways that point to the contradictory, incoherent nature of hegemonic ideologies.

Item Type:	Thesis or Dissertation (PhD)
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN1993 Motion Pictures
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Motion pictures -- United States -- History -- 20th century, Europe -- In motion pictures -- History -- 20th century
Official Date:	March 2013
Dates:	Date Event March 2013 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of Film and Television Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Sponsors:	Warwick Postgraduate Research Scholarship (WPRS); University of Warwick. Humanities Research Centre
Extent:	302 leaves : illustrations
Language:	eng

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