Passport to Hollywood: Hollywood Films, European Directors (review)

308 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Passport to Hollywood: Hollywood Films, European Directors SUNY Press, 1998 By James Morrison As the tide of this book suggests, Passport to Hollywood is about the immigration to Hollywood of European directors during the rise of European fascism and the resulting intermingling and fusion of these two different film institutions. Traditionally the Hollywood cinema as a cultural institution has been understood as both dominant and other in relationship to European cinema. Dominant because of its production of mass-produced fantasies that gained wotldwide hegemony as early as the 1910s. Other because of its fundamental alliance with mass culture which has historically threatened to overcome modernism's place in the cultural hierarchy. The ideologies in Hollywood films have long been associated with notions of certitude, the wedding of American populism and monopoly capitalism , linear narratives, and stable patterns of identification. In short, strategies which seek to exclude contradiction and difference and thereby insure the continued generation of the institution. In sharp contrast to HoUywood film, the European cinema rejects vacuity and the commodification of modernity, critiquing this same modernity and defining itself as the bastion of highbrow culture and formal experimentation. Despite the fact that both cinemas seek to define themselves in relation to each other, both institutions, and all cinemas for that matter, are inherently commercial and function as social and economic institutions. But because of the rhetoric of alterity that defines the competition between these institutions of representation , the products of this dialogue are contradictory in that oppositional codes are set into play. Sunrise, for instance, is a product of Hollywood, but also a signifier of foreignness due to Lang's reputation. In terms of identification the film conflates distanciation associated with modernist texts with the emotional engagement found in mass cultural forms of textuality. This schismatic quality of the texts that European directors in Hollywood produce undermines die confidences that secure the homogeneities and discursive unities of the Hollywood system and creates distance between the two institutions. The result, according to Morrison, is a hybridity but also a process in which these texts constitute "resistance and assimilation, canonization and re-accentuation, as tetms from one institutional system are translated, transported reinscribed within anodier" (14). Morrison draws generously from the work of Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin, theorists who reflected on the positive aspects of hybridity in cultural formations. Through the prism of these theories, the author illuminates "the dialogical manifestations of style" in the films that he analyzes thus pointing the three key issues that structure his book, cultural modernism, cultural hierarchy, and the ways in which national culture mediates these other two issues. The first half of the book treats the films of directors such as F. W Murnau, Fritz Lang, Joseph Losey, and Jean Renoir. Here Morrison concentrates on the opposition ofthe differential codes of expressionism /Hollywood, highbrow/lowbrow culture , and modernity/modernism that produces a "suspended dialectic" that breaks down the autonomy of each term. In the second half, which studies the work of a later generation of directors, Milos Forman, Richard Lester, John Boorman and Ivan Passer, he discusses how this indeterminacy also reproduces itself in the films' treatment of Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 309 national culture and identity. The Hollywood institution attempts to claim ownership of cinematic commodities by internalizing and assimilating foreignness or difference , for instance when it appropriates the signifier of Renoir's authorship. But ironically this claiming of ownership, instead of assuring a coherent articulation of a homogenous American culture, displays the cultural specificities of Hollywood and French national cinema, thus creating an overdetermined text. As the author himself admits, the strong points of the book are the textual analyses which, well written and interesting , combine a blend of deconstruction, cultural critique and psychoanalysis. The examinations of Sunrise (Murnau, 1927), Scarlet Street (Lang, 1945), and Petulia (Lester, 1968) are particularly well-developed . However it is precisely the dependence on deconstruction as a method that at times keeps Morrison's argument in a perpetually in-between space, victim of an undecidability that never finds a determining force for the referent. Marsha Kinder, in her highly influential wotk Blood Cinema, has already discussed the...