week 5

Peter Kramer Post-Classical Hollywood pp 69-75
The bulk of Hollywood centered criticism:

They concentrated their efforts on the systematic critical re-evaluation and careful assessment of the films of an elite collection of directors from Hollywood. These men directed some of their most important films during the 1930s-1940s. This Studio era is where they got their start and training. These directors worked almost exclusively in well-established genres. Critics like Manny Farber wrote about ‘the male action film’ and Howard Hawks. The politique des auteurs of Cahiers du cinema also had an accent on directors from Hollywood like Hitchcock. These genre directors and their films attained a status of art by Anglo-American ‘auteurist’ criticism. These critics rejected the new directors who were trained in theater and television.
They dealt with contemporary films by judging them against the new films of old masters.

Timelines for Hollywood Classicism:
Bazin’s timeline states that in America/Hollywood from 1920 to 1939 there existed a unified period characterized by the world wide diffusion of a common form of cinematic language based on the continuity of editing. The period is the Classical Hollywood period where film reached a perfected stage. In 1939 it was also on the verge of a change in film language. This is the start of ‘regeneration of realism in story telling.’ He states that ‘Citizen Kane was the pivotal film that started the new era in a trend towards modernism.

Peter Lloyd and Thomas Elsaeser states this timeline of Classicism started from 1910 to mid-1960s. The filmic language evolved by Griffith, Stroheim and Murnua remained valid as the syntactical basis of movie making. Directors with long careers like John Ford and Raoul Walsh also helped create this essential classicism in films.