American Film
Author: Ian Scott
Cinema may not have originated in the United States but moving pictures swiftly became the definitive American art form of the twentieth century. Today, “Hollywood movies”, as we tend to call them – though much American cinema exists outside Hollywood, too – dominate the world market. A lot of contemporary Hollywood cinema is variously described as mainstream, conventional, or even formulaic; but there are still significant numbers of films, filmmakers, actors and actresses who capture our imagination, whose films weave a spell over our collective memory and thought, and who retain the power to effortlessly deliver us to other times, places and cultures while we sit in the dark for a couple of hours, absorbing the imagery unfolding before our eyes.
From Stagecoach to Star Wars, from Mary Poppins to Pulp Fiction, American cinema boasts a staggering array of statistics making clear its influence and legacy around the world. Hollywood sells 1.4 billion tickets a year to moviegoers in the United States alone, ticket sales around the world account for $23 billion and the average production costs for a film are nearly $100 million. Each Hollywood movie on average achieves gross receipts of $37.3 million. By any standards these are astonishing figures, dwarfing what is possible in most other national film cultures.
Yet how did this all come to pass? If you are interested in the study of film, then you are in short interested in the study of the United States in the twentieth century. How one group of first and second generation immigrants moved to a small town in California and set up one of the biggest industries in the world is also a tale of history, migration and western expansion, of politics, racial, gender and class divisions that resonate across time and space in the recent American experience. And this list only covers the history of the film studios and the people who came to live and work there. Studying the films themselves gives you a chance to think about themes of genre, authorship, the modern and the postmodern, of audience reception, economics and ideology. You might be interested in the musical escapism of The Wizard of Oz, the westerns of Clint Eastwood, the gangster pictures of Jimmy Cagney, or the science-fiction of The Matrix. It really doesn’t matter what time, genre or style you want to study, the one thing that you will discover is that American movies have filtered through the consciousness of successive generations of people around the world for over a hundred years.
Today there are more opportunities to study film than ever, and more American Studies programmes offering film options than ever before. You will get a chance to not only research film but also find out how it has become so important to the cultural fabric of a nation.
As the French film critic André Bazin wrote in 1957: “the American cinema is a classical art …why not admire in it, then, what is most admirable, the genius of the system.” That “system” calls on you to study its intricacies and complications and all its myriad fascinations in a variety of contexts – social, cultural, psychological. And American Studies will help you do that.
