Since World War II, the major US film studios have come to rely on fewer and fewer increasingly expensive and profitable films for their revenues. We will spend the next three weeks researching the economic changes causing Hollywood to invent the "blockbuster." We will also learn to understand how those economic conditions shape the films formally and aesthetically.  In other words, we will be testing the materialist hypothesis that the conditions under which a work of art is produced, sold and received determine it 's textual features.

In order to start mapping contemporary "Hollywood" as an industry, we will screen Robert Altman 's anatomy of the business The Player (1992). The film will also introduce us to the question of how movies reflect "Hollywood 's " understanding of itself. By reading Theodor  Adorno and Max Horheimer 's seminal essay "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception " in conjunction with The Player we will introduce the notion of industrially produced art and some basic historical materialist methods. By reading the essay in conjunction with Altman 's film, we will bring to light differences between today 's entertainment industry and that of the 1930s and 40s.

We will learn about contemporary economic conditions by reading some industrial histories of Hollywood since the end of World War 2. These histories will allow us to track the history of blockbuster films through innovations in financing, production, marketing, distribution and exhibition as well as underlying shifts in markets and the law. Along with these readings, we will screen Jaws (Universal, 1975) as a key moment in the history of the high concept "event film."

After sketching the economic structure of today 's film industry, we will open a series of three case studies in which we will read about a film and screen it. First, we will read several industrially informed interpretations of Jurassic Park (Universal, 1993) to see how the authors use economic facts about the movie in developing their understand of the film as a text.

Well will go on to read about the film director as author in the contemporary industry. The articles in this section emphasize the commercial relations that influence the persona of star directors Quentin Tarantino and Francis Ford Coppola. We will screen Bram Stoker 's Dracula (Coppola/Columbia, 1992) in order to think about the use of directors with a reputation for being artists in blockbusters.  

For our final case study, we will spend a session discussing readings about The Matrix (Warner Brothers, 1999) and screening the film. We will develop a materialist understanding of that film 's key special effect "bullet time" as an expression of a contemporary consumer’s subjectivity.

The in the last week of class we will study the globalization of the film industry and it 's impact on movie-making around the world. Along with reading the path breaking industrial study Global Hollywood, we will look at thee internationally produced films , each of which can be more or less understood as an allegory for "global" entertainment: Pearl Harbor (Touchstone, 2001), Die Another Day (MGM, 2002) and XXX (Revolution, 2002)