Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles by Mark Shiel (review)

"Where is the line between reality and representation to be drawn?" (7), asks Mark Shiel in the introduction to Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles. In the four chapters that follow, he shows how porous, indistinct, and evanescent that line has been throughout the history of Los Angeles-or the part of it known as Hollywood- and of film, the city's most famous and one time most profitable industry. From the dawn of motion pictures in the late nineteenth century to the decline of the studio system in the mid-twentieth, Shiel argues, Hollywood has constructed and portrayed itself in a variety of styles, serving and reflecting shifting social, cultural, and political ideologies.

In the first chapter, "The Trace," Shiels maintains that films from the advent of cinema-for example, actualities by Thomas Edison and shorts by D.W. Griffith-depict Los Angeles as an Edenic, sun-drenched alternative to the bustle and grit of New York. The author analyzes frames from Edison's earliest films depicting urban scenes in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. He notes the crowded composition of the latter two, wherein pedestrians, streetcars, and tall buildings fill the frame and occlude almost all natural spaces. The openness of the Los Angeles shots, on the other hand, with their shorter buildings and more sparsely populated streets, provide visual traces of pre-modern California, when only Native Americans and Mexicans populated the landscape. Shiel asserts that the attractiveness of the Los Angeles settings advertised the city to East Coast filmmakers who migrated west for the unending sun and promise of artistic freedom unavailable in New York. The growing film industry, in turn, encouraged an influx of supporting trades and industries: carpenters, painters, electricians, contractors, and developers. As the author states, "Los Angeles and cinema came to shape each other not only in myth and representation but also in their economics and physical growth" (53).

In the second chapter, "Navigation," Shiel focuses on films made between the mid-1910s and the early 1930s, the era of slapstick comedy, the first mass-produced automobiles, and the first car-chase scenes. Citing statistics illustrating the manifold population and geographical expansion of Los Angeles during this time, the author argues that films by Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, among others, signify the "comical efforts of citizens trying to orient themselves in the city's increasingly large, complex and fast-moving landscape despite its hazards" (69). Indeed, Shiel notes, these early films charted the growth of the city even by means of conveyance portrayed. Thus did Charlie Chaplin primarily walk about Los Angeles while only a decade later Laurel and Hardy rode about town in automobiles and streetcars, occasionally with disastrous results. And as the city developed a skyline, actors such as Harold Lloyd charted its verticality through improbable scenes outside high-rise buildings. The decentralization of place and fragmentation of time in slapstick comedies, Shiel posits, mirrored the rapid dispersion of the film industry beyond Hollywood and into Culver City, Universal City, Studio City, and Burbank. Wide streets and long highways became the meshwork interlacing suburban and film industry sprawl. Sound, however, would change not only film but the structure and layout of the studios themselves.

Shiel derives the title of the third chapter, "The Simulacrum," from a term French theorist Jean Baudrillard coined to refer to a simulation of the real with no basis in reality. Specifically, the author claims that as sound, rapid advances in technology, and Taylorist efficiencies and Fordist production methods turned film production in on itself, film studios "often explicitly claimed the status of cities, replicating their physical and social characteristics in their design and construction, and asserting a semi-autonomy of the real city in which they were located and upon which they relied" (128). That is, sound movies demanded a highly controlled and specialized environment, which discouraged the silent era practice of location filming. Sound stages and outdoor sets arose (along with the workshops...