Lecture One: Classical Hollywood Cinema
8/23/2005

Classical Hollywood Cinema: a term used to designate the style of mainstream fiction films produced in America, dating roughly from 1917-1960.

What are the elements of classical Hollywood cinema? This question entails a very comprehensive and extensive answer but today I want to focus on classical cinema’s most important aspect, the privileging of story.

An important term to know is diegesis, which simply means the world of the film’s story. The diegesis includes all that is shown to us onscreen as well as events that are presumed to have occurred and actions and spaces not shown onscreen.

The main elements of stories that fit the paradigm of Classical Hollywood cinema are the following:

1. Causality (the principle that everything that happens must have a cause), especially character-centered causality.
2. Goal-oriented characters
3. Characters typed by occupation, age, gender, class status, and ethnicity
4. Characters who are defined by a consistent bundle of a few salient traits, which are affirmed in speech, dress, and physical behavior
5. Characters typically played by major stars, such as Clark Gable. The importance of character consistency can be seen in the star system, which was a crucial factor in Hollywood film production. Beginning around 1912, studios began to differentiate their films by means of the stars who acted in them. The Hollywood star reinforces the tendency toward strongly profiled and unified characterization.
6. Clearly defined conflicts, complications that intensify to a rising climax, and a resolution that emphasizes formal closure.
7. Narrative economy, which means that the action must move quickly, and that characters must be developed quickly. The opening of a film typically plunges us in medias res, to an immediate understanding of an individual character, who controls the chain of action.
8. Storylines usually have two lines of action. The first is, overwhelmingly, about love.
9. Continuity. Coincidence and haphazardly linked events are believed to flaw the film’s unity and disturb the spectator. Tight causality yields not only consequence but continuity, making the film progress smoothly, easily, with no jars, no waits, no delays.
10. Emphasis on narrative closure.

Classical Hollywood cinema has been called "an excessively obvious cinema,” in that it follows a set of norms, paradigms, and standards that match and gratify viewers’ expectations. Critics of this style of filmmaking argue that it makes viewers watch films passively.

Still, it’s the dominant form of filmmaking. In a sense, all filmmakers respond to this form, either by duplicating these codes or by rejecting and disrupting them. In other words, it is the centre to which all other discourses develop from and respond to.

Clips viewed during lecture:

• Proposal scene from Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)
• Introductory scene featuring Clark Gable in It Happened One Night (1934)
• Opening scenes from Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004)
• Opening scenes from North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchock, 1959)
• Opening scenes from Seven (David Fincher, 1995)
• Closing scene from Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)