Jane Mills,
Loving and Hating Hollywood: Reframing Global and Local Cinemas.
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2009
ISBN: 9 781741756 647
Aud$39.99 (pb)
249pp
(Review copy supplied by Allen & Unwin)

Jane Mills begins her monograph by calling for a widespread film education. Based on her observations of the Australian film industry, she asks why its domestic audience is so disinterested in the national cinematic output and why it prefers American films. She wonders what kind of national cinema could have developed if government(s) – not only in Australia but around the world – had supported a greater understanding of cinema, a greater cineliteracy, which may have led to a wider cinematic diversity than that of Hollywood. She comments: “The problem is circular: without diversity and vision there can be no cineliteracy. Without cineliteracy there can be no cinephilia. Without cinephilia there can be no diversity or vision” (p. 7).

For Mills, this circular problem is at the heart of the lack of domestic audiences’ enthusiasm for their respective national cinema, and why for them “Hollywood is the movies” (p. 7). For the author, this vision of Hollywood – and cinema in general – was and still is generated in most discourses related to cinema by the use of binary oppositions such as commerce vs culture, popular entertainment vs high art, Hollywood vs other cinemas, centre vs periphery, and local vs global, where each term is defined in unyielding ways. For her, this vision of cinema has been further consolidated by the arguments made in the popular film studies text book, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson.

To counteract these narrow ways of thinking, Mills proposes that we change the frame of reference and question the conception of Hollywood as a clearly delineated, homogeneous, stable object. She argues that, to really understand Hollywood and cinema in general, the question to ask shouldn’t be “what is?” but “where is Hollywood?” By asking “where is Hollywood?”, Mills argues that the answers found will lead us to a dynamic vision of Hollywood where definitions and categories are in flux, always in the process of mutation. For her, this vision celebrates the heterogeneity of Hollywood and cinema. To support her proposed analytical framework, she turns away from the neo-formalist closed/rigid/inflexible conception of classical Hollywood cinema and uses Arjun Appadurai’s theoretical work on globalisation which was outlined in his essay ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’ first published in Public Culture in 1990. For Mills, Appadurai’s conceptualisation of globalisation as encompassing cultural flows, which are deterritorialized and transformed through exchanges conducted in increasing speeds and amounts, can help one break away from the existing centre-periphery models used in films studies. Inspired by two of Appadurai’s dimensions of global cultural flows: mediascape and ideoscape, she adds two other dimensions: screenscape and genderscape. In the case of screenscape, Hollywood is conceptualised as decentralised. Screenscape is the cultural dimension where all past and present cinemas inform and transform each other due to their multidirectional interactions overcoming borders that are now defined as porous. She comments: “By uncovering and discovering cinema’s history of intercinematic flows, one can arrive at a new perspective on the intensification of these processes in contemporary cinema. This is necessary to the task of re-imagining Hollywood: its history and the ways in which it has been imagined in the past inform how it is imagined today.” (p. 43)

To undertake the “mapping of the global screenscape,” Mills chooses five types of cinemas “commonly thought of as a Hollywood ‘other’” (p. 67). In her first case-study, she discusses the interactions between the Avant-Garde cinema and Hollywood. To illustrate her point she focuses mainly on Luis Bunuel and Salvator Dali, from their partnership on Un Chien Andalou (France 1929) to their respective careers in Hollywood. Her second case-study of ‘other cinema’ is national cinema. Here she discusses Japanese cinema, particularly the Swordsman genre, and traces the different flows not only inside the Japanese national production system but between this Japanese genre and trans-Asian martial-art films as well as Hollywood westerns and action films. Her third case-study is dedicated to the French New Wave and its nearly fifty year long dialogue with Hollywood. Concentrating on Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de soufflé (France 1960), Mills traces the network of influences from classical Hollywood to the French New Wave and the French New Wave to ‘New’ and contemporary Hollywood. Her fourth case-study explores First Nation Cinema. By looking at different examples form the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, she discusses how First Nation Cinema has been described as ‘the other’ of the other cinema (the local of the national cinema). Here she focuses on the predominance of the ‘road movie’ as a genre for First Nation Cinema and how this genre has been transformed through this lens to the ‘journey’ film hybrid. She also discusses the limits of Hamid Nancify’s ‘accented cinema’ and favours a transcultural approach to closely read such films. Finally, in her last case-study Mills chooses Women’s cinema, highlighting the multidirectional flow between Hollywood and ‘other’ cinemas. In this chapter, she closely reads four films: How Men Propose (Lois Weber 1913); Diary of a Mad Housewife (Frank Perry 1970), A Question of Silence (Marleen Gorris 1982), and Just Another Girl on the IRT (Leslie Harris 1992). Her examples range from diverse historical periods and different types of production, to different roles played by women. With these close readings, she comments on the inadequacies and limits of film theories based on binary oppositions and restrictive categorisations.

Trying to demonstrate the porosity of the borders between ‘other’ cinemas and Hollywood, and show how these borders once crossed can influences all these cinemas, is no small task. The territory to cover is vast. To encompass all types of hybrids created by such multidirectional interactions required more space than a monogram of a little more than two hundred pages.  Therefore, it’s not surprising that Mills limits her discussion to five ‘other’ cinemas with each case illustrated by only a few filmic examples. Whilst her close readings of these films are insightful and persuasive, the reader feels a certain limitation, particularly in the breadth of her exploration of Hollywood’s transformations resulting from this ‘face up’, this dialogue with these ‘other’ cinemas. This is particularly evident in the chapters dedicated to First Nation and Women’s Cinema where Hollywood’s interactions and reactions with these ‘others’ are only alluded to.

Whilst Mills’ main intention, to re-imagine Hollywood as heterogeneous is not new to contemporary film studies, her timely arguments encourage us to delve further than the construction of theoretical frameworks based on binary oppositions and/or prescriptive and rigid categorisations. This ambitious work attempts to balance the Wisconsin school’s dominant and pervasive influence which is propagated through their bestseller text books such as Classical Hollywood Cinema and Film Art: An Introduction. Written in an affable and knowledgeable manner, Mills’ text also crosses the boundary between an interested general readership and film students and, with clarity, tackles some of the main theoretical thoughts and positions found in contemporary film studies, while entertaining the reader.

Nathalie Brillon,
La Trobe University, Australia.

Created on: Tuesday, 1 December 2009