The New Hollywood

AbstractThere have been, of course, many New Hollywoods. In an industry whose only constant has been change — technological, economic, and aesthetic — there is an almost perennial invocation of a New Hollywood emerging from the Old. Most obviously, the introduction of sound created a new Hollywood that replaced the old silent cinema. Many film historians would argue that 1948 marked the beginning of another new Hollywood, as that year's Supreme Court Paramount decision required the studios to sell off their theaters and stop other practices that had guaranteed them a near‐monopoly over exhibition. Furthermore, as Peter Krämer (1998) has illustrated, various film critics and theorists have announced different, yet by their terms definitive, breaks in Hollywood's narrational and stylistic modes. For example, André Bazin declared that 1939–1940 marked the turning point during which Hollywood filmmaking superseded its “classical” period and underwent various “baroque” developments, while critics like Parker Tyler and Gilbert Seldes cited 1952–1953 as the moment when Hollywood radically reconfigured the cinematic experience via widescreen and 3‐D processes in order to differentiate itself from television. A New Hollywood, it seems, never ceases to be in the process of being born.