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List of contents
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Introduction: Cinema, Empire, and the "American Century"
1. The Sublime: Urban Ruins from Nazism to the Cold War
2. The Ethnographic: Imperialist Nostalgia and the American Technological Gaze
3. The Picturesque: Italian Landscape Views and the American Female Gaze
4. Glamour: The Necropolitics of Women's Fashion, from the Bombshell to the Princess
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Anna Cooper is Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Film, and Television, University of Arizona. 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 a volume, Projecting the World: Representing the “Foreign” in Classical Hollywood, recently out from Wayne State University Press.
Summary
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 particular—the sublime, the ethnographic, the picturesque, and glamour—became building blocks in the development of a new American visual language.
Foreword
Expands our understanding of the complex relationship between the American and European metropoles in the postwar period – a period of simultaneous European colonial devolution and American colonial expansion.
Additional text
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 Hollywood’s 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.
