Thursday, February 25, 2010

Steve Cohan: "Hollywood by Hollywood -- The Industrial Self-Reflexivity of In a Lonely Place and Sunset Boulevard" (University of Kentucky: 3/4/10)

"Hollywood by Hollywood: The Industrial Self-Reflexivity of In a Lonely Place and Sunset Boulevard"
by Steven Cohan
Thursday, March 4, 4:00 PM in the Niles Gallery

Steven Cohan's Masked Men "provides a stunning, important, and very entertaining addition to American film studies, to cold war studies, and to gender studies. An exemplary piece of cultural criticism, it helps us construct a sharper, more complete understanding of the fabric of assumptions and tenets of cultural production that circumscribe the performance of 'masculinity' at a specific historical moment."
--Film Quarterly

Professor Cohan, who teaches at Syracuse University, is widely recognized as one of the leading scholars and critics of post-World War II American film. His numerous works include Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Indiana UP, 1997), Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical (Duke UP, 2005) and, most recently, CSI: Crime Scenes Investigation (BFI and Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008). In addition, he has edited or co-edited books on Hollywood musicals, on "road movies," and on masculinities in Hollywood cinema, and he is co-editor of the series "In Focus: Routledge Film Readers," that includes over a dozen titles. Professor Cohan is also an expert on Narrative theory and the English novel, a topic on which he has published two books and several articles.

Professor Cohan's talk will come from his work-in-progress, Self-Reflexive Hollywood, a book on movies about movie-making and the branding of US motion pictures. The talk is free and open to the public.

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