Magnificent intimacy: a relationship of style in contemporary Hollywood cinema

Economically and aesthetically, the grand scale of contemporary Hollywood cinema is often considered in pejorative terms. The weighty influence of the system and the inflated style of its films are subjects of censure. Concentrating on a relationship of style, this thesis sees the grand designs of contemporary Hollywood as constituting a possibility for the period. Four films of grand conception are shown to shape their designs, in measures of magnitude and exactitude, to convey expressions of human closeness. The films under consideration are: The Age of Innocence (Scorsese, 1993), The Bridges of Madison County (Eastwood, 1995), The Insider (Mann, 1999) and The Straight Story (Lynch, 1999). The relationship between ‘big’ and ‘little’ concerns is explored in the films through their handling of points of style: in patterns, arrangements, concentrations of detail, and measures of refinement and integration. In large-scale compositions, the films bring out the intricacies and intimacies of their characters’ relationships to their environment and each other. In a series of close readings, the thesis considers the films’ handling of particular elements of style, as components of their ‘big architecture’: location and landscape, performance and gesture, dialogue, music, editing and camerawork. As Film Studies predominantly considers contemporary Hollywood film from different perspectives - historically, socio-economically, in a cultural context - the thesis offers another way of understanding and appreciating works of the current period. Equally, the thesis redirects the principles of evaluative criticism, in adopting an approach of‘close analysis’ that is normally applied to classical Hollywood. A concentration on intimate expressions realized in an environment of amplitude allows for the consideration of an overlooked achievement of contemporary Hollywood. In discerning the different ways the films achieve their expressions, in making precise discriminations of the detail of moments in film, the thesis extends the vocabulary of sustained criticism on contemporary Hollywood cinema.