American History and Contemporary Hollywood Film

The Relation between Hollywood and the New Threat Perception of the USA after the End of the Cold War from the Perspective of Postmodernism

“…Hollywood is successful in reflecting the zeitgeist and making the audience interpret the American philosophical thought as well. In any case, there is "a general consensus that Hollywood films are complex cultural documents which speak either implicitly or explicitly to the concerns and preoccupations of their own moment of production" (McCrisken and Pepper, 2005: 2).…”

In praise of an ‘invisible genre’? An ambivalent look at the fictional sports feature film

“…frequently condemned for rewriting history'. 7 Quoting Joan Hoff, they claim Hollywood provides an 'arrogant distortion of the historical record' or even the 'rape of US history'. 8 But, as McCrisken and Pepper concede, films such as Ali (2001) can occupy a place outside of ideology per se .…”

The New Face of Global Hollywood:Black Hawk Downand the Politics of Meta-Sovereignty

“…Typical American war films set about reinforcing national myths by affirming and enabling a sense of national identity, securing a consensus for war, and promoting "noble" American soldiers on humanitarian missions abroad. As many scholars have argued, this process is easy with respect to the Second World War (the most "just" war in history), but is more difficult with any American intervention post-Vietnam -especially "Operation Restore Hope," which was perceived as a failure by the American public (Barkawi 2004;McCrisken and Pepper 2005). The filmmakers of Black Hawk Down had the difficult task of rewriting the intervention in Somalia as a success, and creating an "epitaph of bravery, commitment and selflessness" by honoring the nineteen American soldiers who died on the mission (Singer 2002: 152).…”