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Hollywood's Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World
Performing Arts > Film - History & Criticism
- Columbia University Press
- Paperback
- 9780231201513
- -
- -
- Performing Arts > Film - History & Criticism
- (Single Author) Asian American
- English
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Book Description
In a history that stretches from Buenos Aires and Tokyo to Johannesburg and Cairo, Ross Melnick considers these movie houses as cultural embassies. He examines how the exhibition of Hollywood films became a constant flow of political and consumerist messaging, selling American ideas, products, and power, especially during fractious eras. Melnick demonstrates that while Hollywood's marketing of luxury and consumption often struck a chord with local audiences, it was also frequently tone-deaf to new social, cultural, racial, and political movements. He argues that the story of Hollywood's global cinemas is not a simple narrative of cultural and industrial indoctrination and colonization. Instead, it is one of negotiation, booms and busts, successes and failures, adoptions and rejections, and a precursor to later conflicts over the spread of American consumer culture. A truly global account, Hollywood's Embassies shows how the entanglement of worldwide movie theaters with American empire offers a new way of understanding film history and the history of U.S. soft power.
Author Bio
Ross Melnick is associate professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of American Showman: Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 1908–1935 (Columbia, 2012).
Education
Ph.D. Cinema and Media Studies - UCLA
M.A. Cinema and Media Studies - UCLA
B.A. American Studies - Brandeis University
Source: University of California Santa Barbara
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