| Current research | |
My research monograph Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles will be published by Reaktion Books in 2012. In this work, I examine the history of the relationship between Hollywood, cinema and Los Angeles from the 1900s to the 1950s. I do this through a focus on the city's representation in films as utopia and dystopia, from Thomas Edison actuality films of Los Angeles to slapstick comedy and from movies about the movies at the height of the studio system to film noir as it declined. Throughout the book, I relate the city's cinematic image to the crucial economic, political, and social role of the film industry in the life and evolution of Los Angeles from desert backwater in the nineteenth century to twentieth- and twenty-first century megalopolis. I am editing a collection of new essays, entitled Architectures of Revolt, on the conjuncture between cinema, cities, and political protest in 1968. This will be published by Temple University Press in 2013. Future projects will include an edited volume on cinema and the US underground press in the 1960s, and further work on cinema in/and Los Angeles since the 1960s. |
|