Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles - Hardcover

Shiel, Mark

3.25

12 ratings by Goodreads

9781861899026: Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1861899025 ISBN 13: 9781861899026

Publisher: Reaktion Books, 2012

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Los Angeles: the 'City of Angels'. Whether this epithet evokes sunshine and beaches, glamorous movie stars or the possibility of fame, many around the world have a fantasy of this enchanting, impossible place stored in their minds. Its reality is as much the record of the place on film as the 'real' Los Angeles. This is because Los Angeles is first and foremost a city of cinema, both in the movies that are made there, and the filmed image of the place, either recorded on location or recreated in a studio set. In Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles, Mark Shiel explores Los Angeles from the invention of motion pictures in the 1890s to the decline of the studio system in the 1950s, describing the ever-changing cinematic image of the city, and the ways in which its representations reflected and manipulated its physical geography. Shiel shows how the construction of studios helped to change the shape of Los Angeles, and how Hollywood not only contributed to but also complicated its economic, political, social and cultural life.The author describes the incredibly popular films that were produced during this time, from the early slapstick comedies to film noir, arguing that the histories of Los Angeles and its film industry cannot be understood in isolation from each other. Shiel gives a close analysis of narrative, mise en scene, cinematography, editing and other elements of film style, concentrating on the ways in which filmmakers engaged with the architecture of the city both inside the studios and on location in California. Written by an expert in the history and theory of cinema and the city, Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles in a must-read for anyone interested in Hollywood movies, or the history and architecture of Los Angeles. As well as being illustrated with many previously unpublished photographs, the book offers an in-depth view of the city that has never been seen before.

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Product Description:

Hollywood cinema and Los Angeles cannot be understood apart. Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles traces the interaction of the real city, its movie business, and filmed image, focusing on the crucial period from the construction of the first studios in the 1910s to the decline of the studio system fifty years later. As Los Angeles gradually became one of the ten largest cities in the world, the film industry made key contributions to its rapid growth and frequent crises in economic, social, political and cultural life. Whether filmmakers engaged with the real city on location or recreated it on a studio set, Los Angeles shaped the films that were made there and circulated influentially worldwide. The book pays particular attention to early cinema, slapstick comedy, movies about the movies and film noir, which are each explored in new ways, with an emphasis on urban and architectural space and its representation, as well as filmmaking style and technique. Including many previously unpublished photographs and new historical evidence, Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles gives us a never-before-seen view of the City of Angels.

Review:

`Mark Shiel's brilliant book provides a sweeping vision of the ways in which the film industry provided viewers a means of conceiving of the urban built environment, and particularly that of Los Angeles. But, what is even more innovative is the ways in which he integrates that discussion with a related consideration of how that industry actually rebuilt the city. This study is a landmark synthesis of film and cultural history.' --Stanley Corkin, Professor of English, University of Cincinnati, and author of Starring New York: Filming the Grime and Glamour of the Long 1970s

'The history of film and the history of Los Angeles have been richly explored in all stages and varieties of their development. Yet never before have they been so deftly analyzed as an integrated phenomenon. Mark Shiel's excellent study is a significant contribution to urban and cinematic cultural history.' --Thomas Hines, Professor of History and Architecture, UCLA, and author of Architecture of the Sun, Los Angeles Modernism, 1900-1970

'Los Angeles engages landscapes of a geographic, geologic, cultural, economic, and political kind. It is a place one finds on a map and on the big screen . . . a sprawling American place captured complexly and completely here in Mark Shiel's suitably sprawling cultural history. Focusing on a century of interactions and disjunctures between the city and the cinema produced there, Shiel introduces something of a new urban ecology of the movies, one in which the landscape and built-environment resonate with enduring American dreams of space and place, of life, leisure and a setting (a location) on which to act it all out.' --Jon Lewis, Professor of English, Oregon State University, and author of books including Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry and American Film: A History

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