| Abstract |
In her 1996 essay 'Americanitis: European Intellectuals and Hollywood Melodrama', Laura Mulvey revisits her own history as a film scholar in the context of an emerging film studies culture, discussing in particular the 1960's generation of cinephiles' fascination with Hollywood. American film was, she writes, 'energetic and cathartic, a cinema of the machine age, streamlined and commodified, able to produce and repeat successful formulas, stories or stars, as Detroit might produce motor cars. This cinema stood in direct opposition to high cultural values encrusted with the weight and authority of tradition. European intellectuals took up American cinema partly in a spirit of political polemics with the traditions and values of their own culture.' Mulvey was part of a group of film scholars in Britain who sought to reinvent film culture through establishing the importance of studying American genre films.\n\nThe extraordianry success of the British cinephiles' project insured the absorption of genre pictures as a key focus of study in the early years of film studies in the UK. This, however, was rapidly followed by the reorientation of the discipline towards structuralist, post-structuralist, feminists, and psychoanalytic theory. In retrospect, it is now possible to see that one consequence of an overt engagement with theory as a means of politicising the study of film was the marginalisation of questions that were (and are) fundamental to the historical analysis of American film production.\n\nMy project returns to the formation of film studies in Britain in the 1960's in order to investigate the history of intellectual engagement with postwar action films. My investigation will consider the peculiaraly British relationship with American popular films, which I will compare with the French affair with American cinema and American intellectual engagement with its indigenous commercial cinema. I will look at the role played by American genre films in such forums as the BFI summer schools, Screen and Movie, and the Edinburgh film festival. I will also examine the work of individuals whose writings and teaching made genre films play a decisive part in bringing forward the serious study of American cinema in Britain.\n\nA significant part of my research will focus on a 'lost' figure in British film criticism the art historian Lawrence Alloway. In 1969 Alloway curated a series of film screenings of American action movies at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Most of the 35 films screened were at the time of their original release obscure genre pictures that have subsequently become some of the most valued and analysed examples of American filmmaking. Titles in the screening programme include Out of the Pat, The Big Heat, Kiss Me Deadly, Written on the Wind, Touch of Evil, Seven Men From Now, Steel Helmet, and In a Lonely Place. Alloway did not intend to further validate the individual films, to proclaim these titles as great works of American art, but instead he sought to better understand American art through conceptualising mass art within the context of the culture from which it is produced and consumed. To achieve this aim, film's status as a mechanical art for the masses must be recognised, he argued, and, as such, individual films were less important than the cycle of film production in which they existed: American silm's 'formal elaboration and thematic complexity' will only be revealed by looking across film cycles, Alloway elaborated.\n\nBy researching the role of American action movies in the formation of film studies in Britain, and in the film writings of Alloway, I will offer new insights into the development of British film studies and suggest the direction that new work on American film production cycles might take. |