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Incomparing and contrasting Perry’s media influence with that of another famous director, Paul Reinsch concludes the collection by reframing the media discourse around Tyler Perry’s work and career to consider him alongside a comparable media mogul: George Lucas. What might the creator of Star Wars and the creator of Madea possibly have in common (aside from a possible penchant for high fantasy)? In closely analyzing the critical reception, aesthetics, and ideologies of Perry’s For Colored Girls(2010) and Lucas’s Red Tails(2012), Reinsch exposes how each filmmaker ultimately negotiates a particular nostalgia for Classical Hollywood Cinema while also maintaining a particular intrusiveness.

Chapter 1 explains Hollywood’s general principles for creating aesthetic pleasure for mass audiences. The chapter introduces the book’s two main theses: (1) Hollywood cinema targets an area, between boredom and confusion, that is optimally pleasing for mass audiences. It seeks to offer enough cognitive challenge to sustain aesthetic interest but not so much that it would jeopardize a film’s hedonic value or cause average spectators to give up the search for understanding. (2) Many of the Hollywood films that offer exhilarating aesthetic experiences beyond a single encounter and over extended periods operate near the boundaries of classicism, veering into areas of novelty and complexity that more typical Hollywood films avoid; however, they do so without sacrificing a mass audience’s ability to cope with the challenge. Such films take risks, and exhilarated pleasure results when they seem on the verge of overburdening or displeasing spectators in some bold and extraordinary way.

This chapter explores the tensions in Cukor's late style through three of his later films. Justine (1969) is Cukor's most sustained encounter with modernism and his most vigorous effort to engage with stylistic and narrative “advances” of the New Hollywood. Travels With My Aunt (1972) is something of a retrenchment, unapologetically “old-fashioned” in many ways, yet selectively incorporating new techniques and post-Production Code material in a manner that illustrates Cukor's attitude toward the new dispensation. Rich and Famous (1981) synthesizes these approaches, harking back to Classical Hollywood after the New Hollywood itself had waned, yet it evinces a certain surface chic more effortlessly than any of Cukor's other late films.

This part draws upon Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” with regard to the patriarchal bias of mainstream film. The visual emphases of Mulvey’s work are redirected towards film sound tracks, opening up new possibilities for considering how gender politics are aurally communicated. This part provides a close analysis of the sound track of To Have and Have Not (1944), which is followed by an analysis of the internationally celebrated sound track for The Piano (1993). With particular attention to Lauren Bacall’s performances of songs in To Have and Have Not, and Holly Hunter’s piano playing in The Piano, this part considers the mixed messages of the films with regard to female empowerment. Particular attention is given to the controversial automutism of Ada McGrath (the character played by Hunter) and the diegetic sound effects of The Piano that establish a specific colonial context for understanding her aural subversiveness.

This chapter traces the emergence of classical Hollywood cinema from the earlier practices often called the cinema of attractions. The chapter argues that the cinema of attractions attracted viewers due to the astonishment of seeing lifelike movement. Although classical cinema continues to tap into this special affection, it also develops modes that enable the feeling of the fantastic – seeing things with human eyes that only seem to exist in the imagination. Classical cinema thus develops a mode that relies upon the transposability and translocatability of the medium to structure a relation with the viewer. The movement-image (Deleuze) is the name for the interface developed for this mode.

Chapter 3 studies the aesthetic pleasures of Hollywood cinema’s approach to storytelling. It examines the cognitive processes at work when a film cues spectators to construct a film’s story in their minds, and it explains the ways in which Hollywood movies both facilitate and complicate the spectator’s process of story construction. The chapter offers a new theory of Hollywood storytelling aesthetics—illustrated with examples from whodunits, screwball comedies, twist films, and mysteries—that film viewers take pleasure not just in narrative unity and easy understanding, as previous scholars have argued, but also in narrative disunity and cognitive challenge. With support from experimental psychology, the chapter argues that viewers enjoy narratives that stimulate moments of free association, insight, and incongruity-resolution.

Chapter 5 investigates the aesthetic pleasures of Hollywood’s stylistic norms, as well as pleasures afforded by a handful of noteworthy stylistic deviations. The chapter examines the ways in which Hollywood film style both supports a film’s storytelling function (by enhancing clarity and expressiveness) and offers aesthetic pleasures independent of storytelling (decoration and stylistic harmony). A film’s style may also compete with story (e.g., Touch of Evil), with genre (Leave Her to Heaven), or even with itself (Goodfellas) for control of a film’s mood and meaning. Such stylistically dissonant works inspire cognitive play as we adjust to stylistic cues that harbor disparate attitudes and meanings.

Chapter five reconceptualizes the notion of the tableau vivant by focusing on some of the encounters between film and photography, which are also marked by a fascination for bodies arrested in time. Particularly examining the film still of classical Hollywood films, this chapter traces the historical development of this photographic genre through an investigation of the statements made by ‘still men’ in trade journals throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In addition, this chapter discusses the aesthetics of the film still, which implies a specific kind of light, focus, narrative, temporality and the instantaneous. Finally, it investigates how these elements were taken up by prominent art photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall, who have appropriated ‘cinematic’ formulas in their works since the 1970s, as well as by contemporary video artists who developed the ‘still film.’