E-Book Overview
Who can forget Dorothy's quest for the great and powerful Oz as she tried to return to her beloved Kansas? She thought she needed a wizard's magic, only to discover that home -- and the power to get there -- had been with her all along. This engaging and provocative book proposes that Hollywood has created an imaginary cinematic geography filled with people and places we recognize and to which we are irresistibly drawn. Each viewing of a film stirs, in a very real and charismatic way, feelings of home, and the comfort of returning to films like familiar haunts is at the core of our nostalgic desire. Leading us on a journey through American film, Elisabeth Bronfen examines the different ways home is constructed in the development of cinematic narrative. Each chapter includes a close reading of such classic films as Fleming's The Wizard of Oz, Sirk's Imitation of Life, Burton's Batman Returns, Hitchcock's Rebecca, Ford's The Searchers, and Sayles's Lone Star.
E-Book Content
bronfen_FM 7/23/04 11:59 AM Page i Home in Hollywood FILM AND CULTURE / John Belton, General Editor bronfen_FM 7/23/04 11:59 AM Page ii FILM AND CULTURE A series of Columbia University Press John Belton, General Editor What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder HENRY JENKINS Designing Women: Cinema, Art Deco, and the Female Form Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle MARTIN RUBIN Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II MICHELE PIERSON LUCY FISCHER Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture THOMAS DOHERT Y THOMAS DOHERT Y Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy ANDREW BRIT TON WILLIAM PAUL Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s ED SIKOV Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema REY CHOW The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Magisterial Vision and the Figure of Woman SUSAN M. WHITE Black Women as Cultural Readers JACQUELINE BOBO Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film DARRELL WILLIAM DAVIS Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema RHONA J. BERENSTEIN This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age GAYLYN STUDL AR Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond ROBIN WOOD Masculine Interests: Homoerotics in Hollywood Film ROBERT L ANG Silent Film Sound RICK ALTMAN The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music JEFF SMITH Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture MICHAEL ANDEREGG Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 THOMAS DOHERT Y Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity JAMES L ASTRA Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts BEN SINGER Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture ALISON GRIFFITHS Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies LOUIS PIZZITOL A bronfen_FM 7/23/04 11:59 AM Page iii Elisabeth Bronfen Home in Hollywood The Imaginary Geography of Cinema COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK bronfen_FM 7/23/04 11:59 AM Page iv Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright © 200