Otherness in Hollywood Cinema

In Otherness in Hollywood Cinema, Michael Richardson traces many of the ways in which Hollywood has constructed otherness, and discusses the extent to which those images have persisted and conditioned today's understanding He argues that the ambiguous position of Hollywood both within American society and within the global market has meant that its images of others, whether established through stories set in exotic and faraway places or within more everyday settings, were often more complex than is generally thought.

Needing an international audience to sustain the extent of its ambition. Hollywood coaxed the finest talents from around the world and sought to produce films with a broadly universal appeal Moreover, the industry was founded and sustained from the beginning by people who had experienced various forms of exile and cultural displacement. As a result. Hollywood confounded American insularity while presenting a vision of "American" to the world.

The book examines a range of genres from the perspective of otherness, including the Western, film noir, and zombie movies. Films discussed include Birth of a Nation. The New World. The Searchers, King Kong, Apocalypse Now. Blade Runner, Jaws, and Dead Man Erudite and highly informed. this is a sweeping survey of how the American film industry has portrayed the foreign and the exotic.

Michael Richardson is Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. His interests focus on issues of cultural representation and he is the author of George Bataille. The Experience of Culture and Surrealism and Cinema. He has also edited a collection of writings of Georges Bataille on surrealism (The Absence of Myth) and surrealism and the Caribbean (Refusal of the Shadow)