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10 Transition and Transformation
construction, defined by the audience; a “national” cinema consists of films that
are perceived as “national” at a given point. This does not exclude that a group
of national films may also contain certain stylistic devices, or be made according
to certain codes. 5 Hollywood is also a particular case, at it is generally considered
“international” but precisely by being “national”, in Thomas Schatz’ and
Alisa Perren’s phrasing “a distinctly American phenomenon”. Moreover, as
they have argued:
Any effort to assess, analyze, or even describe “Hollywood” inevitably begins with a
definitional dilemma. The term Hollywood refers to an actual place, of course – a
community north of Los Angeles that emerged, nearly a century ago, as a primary
base of operations for the burgeoning American film industry. But the industry involved
far more than the Hollywood environs even then, and as it continued to develop,
the meanings associated with the term Hollywood became increasingly complex
and multivalent. Most fundamentally, the term Hollywood refers to three interrelated
aspects of American cinema: the industrial, the institutional, and the formal-aesthetic.
6
This study touches upon all three aspects of Hollywood cinema and their interrelations.
In examining stylistic devices and relating them to the systems of production,
I have also drawn inspiration from Kristin Thompson’s work on German
émigrés in Hollywood, with a particular focus on Ernst Lubitsch. 7
However, unlike Thompson, my method is not neo-formalist, and I do not proceed
in the systematic way that she does, to compile a complete inventory of
different stylistic devices. My aim is, rather, to bring together the examination
of a particular film style, as revealed through some central devices, with questions
of meaning. The concept of film style may thus involve narrative meaning,
but, even more importantly, it opens for discussion the cultural contexts of
which the films are themselves part, and which in turn both serve to frame and
to take part in the interpretation of their meaning.
In concentrating on Victor Sjöström’s Hollywood films, this study inevitably,
though mostly implicitly, relies upon the concept of authorship, as much questioned
as it has proven hard to kill. The films of Sjöström are here considered as
“authorial” in the sense of their carrying along the imprint of his hand kept in
the process: “on the threshold of the work, evident in the film itself, but also
standing outside it, absent except in the imprint left behind”, much in the same
way as Tom Gunning in his study The Films of Fritz Lang has defined authorship.
8 However, just like in the case of Lang, due to the decisive change in production
cultures from Europe to America, the actual mode of production plays
an equally important role when considering the works. Thus, to speak of the
films as “Sjöström’s” in the Hollywood context is more of a construction than it
was in the Swedish context. The critical reception aspect, however, cannot be