![]() ![]() Films targeting the so-called ‘family audience’ were excellent propaganda for Hollywood, suggesting superior production, inoffensiveness and broad appeal. The family film was the result both of external pressures to make films more morally-suitable for children, and the desire to engage a more middle-class mass audience. Hollywood cinema was already an international cultural phenomenon, but was founded upon a claim to universality that was undermined by the predominance of adult-orientated films. The ‘family film’ originated in early-1930s Hollywood as a mixture of propaganda and commercial idealism. For this reason, they are inextricably linked with Hollywood – the only film industry in the world with the resources and distribution capacity to address a truly global mass audience. Initially, the audience for family films was predominantly domestic, but with the increasing spending power of international audiences, family films are now formulated on the belief that no market is inaccessible. This they achieve through a combination of ideological populism, emotional stimulation, impressive spectacle, and the calculated minimisation of potentially objectionable elements, such as sex, violence, and excessive socio-cultural specificity. I will argue that Hollywood family films are designed to transcend normative barriers of age, gender, race, culture and even taste they target the widest possible audiences to maximise commercial returns, trying to please as many people, and offend as few, as possible. How have ‘family films’ become so globally dominant? One answer is that Hollywood’s international power facilitates the global proliferation of its products, but this explanation, in isolation, is insufficient. Since the 1970s, Hollywood family films have been the most lucrative screen entertainments in the world, and despite their relativelyunexplored status in academic film criticism and history, I will argue that the format is centrally important in understanding mainstream Hollywood cinema.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |