Home in Hollywood
The Imaginary Geography of Cinema
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"What makes Bronfen's book unique is that it refuses to engage in the old Leftist game of dismissing all references to home as proto-Fascist fantasies. Bronfen is able to discern in dreams about sweet home also the repressed emancipatory utopias. THIS is the proper answer to the nationalist discourse of blood/and/soil!"-Slavoj Zizek, author of Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out"Just when Todd Haynes´ Far from Heaven pays generous tribute to the classic 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk, uncovering the politics of race and sexual preference beneath those of gender and age, E...
"What makes Bronfen's book unique is that it refuses to engage in the old Leftist game of dismissing all references to home as proto-Fascist fantasies. Bronfen is able to discern in dreams about sweet home also the repressed emancipatory utopias. THIS is the proper answer to the nationalist discourse of blood/and/soil!"
-Slavoj Zizek, author of Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out
"Just when Todd Haynes´ Far from Heaven pays generous tribute to the classic 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk, uncovering the politics of race and sexual preference beneath those of gender and age, Elisabeth Bronfen has made herself another eloquent advocate of the melodramatic imagination. In "Home and Hollywood", Bronfen meticulously analyses a number of classic and contemporary films, showing why melodrama embodies so modern a world-view. If the cinema has become the home and the family that neither home nor family can ever be, melodrama is perhaps our most acute meditation on home-less-ness and placelessness today. As the genre of the lost object, to which our hopes of happiness are tied, melodrama preserves the longings for home, precisely because it knows it cannot fulfil them.""
-Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam
"Focusing on the singular film, this book employs psychoanalysis to explain Hollywood's obsession with the modern condition of not belonging. Bronfen's highly original readings shed new light on our dire need for illusions."
-Anthon Kaes, University of California, Berkeley
"Elisabeth Bronfen´s exciting new book surveys home both as a place and a figure (along with inextricably bound considerations such as homelessness, exile, and the uncanny) in exemplary American feature films. Her psychoanalytical readings of Hollywood´s fantasy scenarios are sustained with rigor, energy, and wit. The Freudian tools may be well-known, but I can think of few exercises in film analysis which dig so deeply and yield so much"
-Eric Rentschler, Harvard University
Who can forget Dorothy´s quest for the great and powerful Oz as she tried to return to her beloved Kansas? She thought she needed a wizard´s magic, only to discover that home -and the power to get there -had been with her all along.
This engaging and provocative book proposes that Hollywood has created an imaginary cinematic geography filled with people and places we recognize and to which we are irresistibly drawn. Each viewing of a film stirs, in a very real and charismatic way, feelings of home. Cinematic scenes allow us to decipher desires and anxieties that have been coded in the language of film. The comfort of returning to films like familiar haunts is at the core of our nostalgic desire.
Leading us on a journey through familiar twentieth-century American films, Elisabeth Bronfen examines the different ways home is constructed in the development of cinematic narrative. Each chapter includes close readings of crucial scenes in such films as Fleming´s The Wizard of Oz, Sirk´s Imitation of Life, Burton´s Batman Returns, Hitchcock´s Rebecca, Ford´s The Searchers, and Sayles´s Lone Star.
-Slavoj Zizek, author of Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out
"Just when Todd Haynes´ Far from Heaven pays generous tribute to the classic 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk, uncovering the politics of race and sexual preference beneath those of gender and age, Elisabeth Bronfen has made herself another eloquent advocate of the melodramatic imagination. In "Home and Hollywood", Bronfen meticulously analyses a number of classic and contemporary films, showing why melodrama embodies so modern a world-view. If the cinema has become the home and the family that neither home nor family can ever be, melodrama is perhaps our most acute meditation on home-less-ness and placelessness today. As the genre of the lost object, to which our hopes of happiness are tied, melodrama preserves the longings for home, precisely because it knows it cannot fulfil them.""
-Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam
"Focusing on the singular film, this book employs psychoanalysis to explain Hollywood's obsession with the modern condition of not belonging. Bronfen's highly original readings shed new light on our dire need for illusions."
-Anthon Kaes, University of California, Berkeley
"Elisabeth Bronfen´s exciting new book surveys home both as a place and a figure (along with inextricably bound considerations such as homelessness, exile, and the uncanny) in exemplary American feature films. Her psychoanalytical readings of Hollywood´s fantasy scenarios are sustained with rigor, energy, and wit. The Freudian tools may be well-known, but I can think of few exercises in film analysis which dig so deeply and yield so much"
-Eric Rentschler, Harvard University
Who can forget Dorothy´s quest for the great and powerful Oz as she tried to return to her beloved Kansas? She thought she needed a wizard´s magic, only to discover that home -and the power to get there -had been with her all along.
This engaging and provocative book proposes that Hollywood has created an imaginary cinematic geography filled with people and places we recognize and to which we are irresistibly drawn. Each viewing of a film stirs, in a very real and charismatic way, feelings of home. Cinematic scenes allow us to decipher desires and anxieties that have been coded in the language of film. The comfort of returning to films like familiar haunts is at the core of our nostalgic desire.
Leading us on a journey through familiar twentieth-century American films, Elisabeth Bronfen examines the different ways home is constructed in the development of cinematic narrative. Each chapter includes close readings of crucial scenes in such films as Fleming´s The Wizard of Oz, Sirk´s Imitation of Life, Burton´s Batman Returns, Hitchcock´s Rebecca, Ford´s The Searchers, and Sayles´s Lone Star.
