Hollywood : Recent Developments

In many years of collaboration a research group with scholars from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the United States has looked into the most recent developments of Hollywood and its movie productions of the 1990s and the first years of the new century.

Technical and distributional questions of the film market played as important a part as those of transnationalisation and new digital technologies.

Interdependences between computer games and movies are scrutinised and then, of course, focal points of thematic developments.

They reach from remakes and blockbusters to Steven Soderbergh and the works of other independent filmmakers, from science fiction via old and new myths to questions of gender research.

Hollywood's treatment of the most important political event and trauma of the new century, the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 on the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center in war, action, science fiction and disaster movies is dealt with and also the new wave of documentary films (Michael Moore and others).

The Pentagon's influence on the film industry has also to be seen in this context.

A major focus of this book is dedicated to the interdisciplinary co-operation between film research, art history and architecture.

The present study closes with articles about Hollywood and Las Vegas, American cinema architecture and the role of architecture in recent Hollywood movies.