Classic Hollywood ─ Lifestyles and Film Styles of American Cinema, 1930-1960

Studies of "Classic Hollywood" typically treat Hollywood films released from 1930 to 1960 as a single interpretive mass. Veronica Pravadelli complicates this idea. Focusing on dominant tendencies in box office hits and Oscar-recognized classics, she breaks down the so-called classic period into six distinct phases that follow Hollywood's amazingly diverse offerings from the emancipated females of the "Transition Era" and the traditional men and women of the conservative 1930s that replaced it to the fantastical Fifties movie musicals that arose after anti-classic genres like film noir and women's films.

Pravadelli sets her analysis apart by paying particular attention to the gendered desires and identities exemplified in the films. Availing herself of the significant advances in film theory and modernity studies that have taken place since similar surveys first saw publication, she views Hollywood through strategies as varied as close textural analysis, feminism, psychoanalysis, film style and study of cinematic imagery, revealing the inconsistencies and antithetical traits lurking beneath Classic Hollywood's supposed transparency.

Veronica Pravadelli is a professor of film studies and director of the Center for American Studies at Roma Tre University and a former visiting professor at Brown University. She is the author of several books including Performance, Rewriting, Identity: Chantal Akerman's Postmodern Cinema, Alfred Hitchcock. Notorious and Le donne del cinema: dive, registe, spettatrici. The Italian edition of Classic Hollywood won two prizes for Best Book in Film Studies.