[Commlist] CFC - Before the Renaissance: Hollywood Art Cinema Under the Studio System

    At its most ambitious, the New Hollywood was a movement intended to
    cut film free of its evil twin, commerce, enabling it to fly high
    through the thin air of art. The filmmakers of the '70s hoped to
    overthrow the studio system, or at least render it irrelevant, by
    democratizing filmmaking, putting it into the hands of anyone with
    talent and determination.


The quotation above forms part of the introduction to Peter Biskind's 
popular history of the Hollywood Renaissance, /Easy Riders, Raging 
Bulls/ (1998, 18), in which he presents a narrative as compelling as it 
is reductive: the romantic story of a generation of visionary filmmakers 
who wrested cinema from the controlling grip of the studios and who, for 
one brief and glorious decade, elevated it into the realms of art. It is 
also, as this collection will demonstrate, a myth — an 
oversimplification that elevated the contributions of the New Hollywood 
while simultaneously working to erode an understanding of the artistic 
contributions of the classical period.

The Hollywood Renaissance is typically conceived as the period from the 
release of/Bonnie and Clyde/ (Arthur Penn, 1967) to the arrival of the 
blockbuster in the mid-to-late 1970s. It is among the most celebrated 
and written-about periods in American film history, and the appeal is 
not difficult to understand. For Biskind, this was 'the last time it was 
really exciting to make movies in Hollywood, the last time people could 
be consistently proud of the pictures they made, the last time the 
community as a whole encouraged good work, the last time there was an 
audience that could sustain it' (1998, 18). As Geoff King observes, the 
period 'has gained almost mythical status in the annals of Hollywood' 
history, and 'is often taken as a benchmark for measuring the state of 
Hollywood in subsequent decades' (2002, 13), having already reshaped our 
perception of the period that preceded it.

Scholarly literature has done much to sustain this mythology. In 
surveying the critical landscape fifty years on, Peter Krämer and Yannis 
Tzioumakis observe that ‘the verdict of cinephiles, critics and scholars 
about the period would appear to be almost unanimous: the late 1960s and 
early 1970s were indeed a kind of golden age in American film history, 
with a wide range of formally and thematically challenging films made’ 
(2018, p. xiv). This is a view reflected in Jonathan Kirshner and Jon 
Lewis’s account in which they suggest, through barely concealed 
nostalgia, that the New Hollywood ‘was in its day embraced with an 
intellectual energy unthinkable with regard to these newer new 
Hollywood’s,’ lamenting that ‘we have, for sure, lost the vitality, the 
originality, the film culture of this golden age’ (2019, 7, 16). Molly 
Haskell, writing in the same collection, distils the period’s ambition 
to the observation that: ‘for one brief moment, it was the best of all 
worlds: American directors got to make European films with Hollywood 
money but without studio restraints’ (2019, 18).

At the centre of most celebratory accounts is the figure of the 
director-as-auteur: the untried artist, influenced by European 
filmmaking, and emboldened by the collapse of the Production Code and 
the fragmentation of the studio system. In popular histories, it is 
within this space that these artists turn Hollywood against itself to 
produce formally adventurous, morally ambiguous, and politically engaged 
cinema.

In an influential account, Thomas Elsaesser identified that for him, the 
hallmark of the New Hollywood protagonist was an inability to pursue a 
goal or respond to a challenge — what he called ‘the pathos of failure’ 
— a narrative mode that aligned American cinema for the first time with 
the conventions of the European art film (2004, 279). For Elsaesser, the 
crucial distinction between the classical and the New Hollywood auteur 
was ideological as much as it was formal: ‘where the latter makes his 
voice heard within the system and its many constraints, the former sets 
himself off against the system’ (2004, p. 46). That oppositionality — 
between the system and the artist, between the generic and the personal, 
between commerce and art, between the classical and the post-classical — 
is the foundational myth that Before the Renaissance sets out to disrupt 
through a reconsideration of the artistry of the films of the classical 
studio period; measured through the characteristics that are perceived 
to separate the New Hollywood from its predecessors.

In the most polemical accounts of the Renaissance — most notably 
Biskind’s — the implicit corollary of the rupture narrative is a 
diminished account of the studio era, in which production is reduced to 
a factory-like regime of creative constraint whose products, however 
technically accomplished, could never be art: they were structurally 
incapable of the formal experimentation, narrative ambiguity, or 
ideological complexity that came to define the Renaissance. Most 
contemporary scholars would not accept so stark a caricature, and the 
historiography of the period has become considerably more nuanced since 
Biskind wrote his polemical account. Yet something of that foundational 
belief — that the studio system was, at best, an unlikely host for 
artistic ambition — persists, however implicitly, in the most 
celebratory accounts of the New Hollywood, and it is this residual 
presumption that the collection seeks to interrogate. A canonisation 
that has worked to distort the perception of the classical period and, 
in the popular imagination at least, has cast the studio system as the 
enemy of artistic endeavour — the very thing that needed to be 
overthrown to make room for the generation of artists that would follow.
There are, however, significant challenges to this narrative. Geoff King 
has observed that ‘sweeping definitions of “New” Hollywood as something 
entirely different overlook important continuities and are often based 
on simplified generalizations about the earlier period’ (2002, 2). 
Moreover, Krämer and Tzioumakis detail how ‘claims about there being 
something fundamentally new in American cinema had been made with 
astonishing regularity from the late 1940s onwards’, with critics 
variously identifying a ‘new maturity’, the ‘New Movie’, a ‘new art of 
the movies’, and ‘America’s “new wave”’ — all in relation to films made 
between the late 1940s and the early 1960s (2018, p. xv).

As for the studio system itself, Barry Langford is clear that its 
dismissal as a merely commercial enterprise fundamentally misrepresents 
the artistry of the work that was actually produced: ‘this was an 
industry capable of producing a rich stream of technically and 
artistically outstanding work that was also, despite the system’s 
factory-like approach, richly varied in tone and content’ (2010, 13). 
Critic Phillip Lopate, writing in the collection /When the Movies 
Mattered/, goes one step further, arguing that ‘Hollywood had already 
achieved a golden age’ in the classical period, citing Ford, Ray, 
Preminger, Sirk, Hitchcock, and Cukor as evidence of that achievement. 
Lopate insists that the formal achievements of the studio era — cinema 
that was brought to ‘a high polish with the wide-screen Cinemascope of 
the fifties and early sixties… represented a standard the Renaissance 
frequently failed to meet (2019, 165–166). Similarly, David Bordwell, 
Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, scholars most closely associated 
with the study of classical era Hollywood, argue that, for all of the 
claims made about the Renaissance, none of the New Hollywood directors 
‘significantly changed the mode of film production’, and that ‘the 
classical style remains the dominant model for feature filmmaking’ 
(1985, 370).

This collection takes these challenges seriously and follows them to 
their logical conclusion, gathering essays that seek to recover a body 
of formally ambitious, narratively complex, and ideologically 
challenging filmmaking produced under the perceived “constraints” of the 
classical studio system between the early 1920s and the late 1960s. 
These chapters will demonstrate how the aesthetic features most commonly 
associated with the Hollywood Renaissance — moral ambiguity, the 
unmotivated or failing protagonist, the loosening of cause-and-effect 
narrative resolution, the visible inscription of a directorial 
personality, and the uneasy negotiation of genre conventions — were 
neither invented by the New Hollywood nor dependent upon the dismantling 
of the Production Code or the fragmentation of the studio system for 
their existence. They were, rather, part of an extant mode of production 
that was simply rearticulated by Renaissance era directors.

Before the Renaissance invites scholars to look again at the films 
produced under the studio system and to ask what formal ambitions, what 
narrative experiments, what acts of ideological resistance or complexity 
were possible — and achieved — before the rupture that, in most popular 
histories, first made Hollywood art cinema possible.

We invite contributions that take the opportunity to interrogate 
periodisation and scrutinise the categorisations of the classical and 
post-classical period (New Hollywood, Renaissance), As Geoff King 
observes, 'the term "classical" itself' is a label that ‘was largely 
elaborated post-hoc, an object defined in terms of its apparent 
disappearance or modification' (King, 2002, p. 7). We are interested in 
whether the notion of a 'classical period' has been productive or has 
itself limited debate, contributing to a discursive binary in which the 
films of the studio era are positioned as stable and tradition-bound— 
the conservative counterpart to the radicalism of the Renaissance. This 
is an open question and one this collection actively invites its 
contributors to address; reorientating our understanding of the emerging 
film industry as something more dynamic, experimental, and 'modernist' 
in its approach. This modernist approach is evident in its engagement 
with new technologies, enabling of new narrative forms, and its 
representation of new social realities. This discursive shift would 
allow for a reconceptualization that repositions the studio system not 
as the obstacle to artistic ambition but as the crucible in which 
cinema's modernist possibilities were realised. Or in Miriam Bratu 
Hansen's terms, that Classical Hollywood cinema was not the antithesis 
of modernism but a form of it, or what Hansen suggested should be 
understood as a 'vernacular modernism' — a mass-produced, industrially 
organised cultural form that mediated, articulated, and reflected upon 
the experience of modernity for a global audience (Hansen, 1999, 66, 64).

The editor welcomes essay proposals from scholars across film, media and 
cultural studies and adjacent disciplines, and is particularly 
interested in work that combines close formal analysis with production 
history, industrial or archival research, and critical and theoretical 
approaches to the directors, producers, films and filmmaking practices 
of the classical studio era.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  * Case studies of formally ambitious or aesthetically experimental
    films produced within the classical studio system (approximately
    1920– late-1960s), with particular attention to narrative ambiguity,
    tonal complexity, or the disruption of generic convention
  * The figure of the studio-era director as artist or proto-auteur:
    creative autonomy, personal style, and the negotiation of industrial
    constraint within the classical system
  * The role of producers, cinematographers, screenwriters, editors, and
    other creative collaborators in enabling aesthetic experiment under
    the studio system — approaches that move beyond director-centred
    models of authorship
  * Émigré filmmakers and the transfusion of European artistic
    sensibilities — expressionism, realism, art cinema — into classical
    Hollywood production
  * Censorship, the Production Code, and the relationship between
    institutional constraint and narrative or aesthetic complexity: what
    the Code enabled as well as what it prohibited
  * Genre mutation, subversion, and hybridity in classical Hollywood:
    the western, the melodrama, the film noir, the woman's film, and
    others as vehicles for ideological instability or formal experiment
  * Classical Hollywood and European art cinema: influence and exchange
    across the studio era, including the work of directors who moved
    between American and European production contexts
  * Industry, economics, and aesthetics: how the studio system's modes
    of production — unit production, the contract system, the B picture
    — shaped and enabled as well as constrained creative practice
  * Stars, performance, and the body: the ways in which studio-era
    performance practice registered psychological complexity, moral
    ambiguity, or social critique
  * Gender, race, sexuality, and class in classical Hollywood: films of
    the studio era that contested, complicated, or exceeded the
    ideological frameworks within which they were produced
  * The reception history of classical Hollywood: how films of the
    studio era were read by contemporary critics, and how critical
    frameworks — auteurism, feminism, psychoanalysis, ideological
    critique — have subsequently transformed our understanding of the 
period
  * Archival and historical approaches to classical Hollywood
    production: new findings from studio archives, production records,
    censorship files, and other primary sources that revise our
    understanding of the aesthetic ambitions of the period
  * Pre-Code Hollywood (1927–1934) as a zone of formal and ideological
    experiment, and its relationship to subsequent production under the 
Code
  * The relationship between classical Hollywood and other American
    cinemas of the period: exploitation, independent, documentary, and
    avant-garde production as contexts for understanding the limits and
    possibilities of studio filmmaking
  * Methodological and historiographical essays that consider the
    relationship between classical Hollywood scholarship and the history
    of the Hollywood Renaissance, and the critical frameworks through
    which both periods have been understood
  * Essays that interrogate the critical and historiographical
    boundaries drawn between the classical studio era and the Hollywood
    Renaissance, examining the continuities, precursors, and
    transitional figures that complicate the narrative of rupture —
    including work on the ‘long 1950s’, the decline of the studio
    system, and the industrial and aesthetic conditions that made the
    Renaissance possible
  * The term ‘classical’ itself as a site of critical inquiry: essays
    that question whether the label — largely constructed post-hoc by
    Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson — adequately describes the formal
    and aesthetic range of Hollywood filmmaking between the 1920s and
    the 1960s, and that consider whether the films of the studio era
    might be more productively understood as ‘modernist’ — engaged with
    new technologies, new narrative possibilities, and the social and
    cultural transformations of the twentieth century — rather than as
    expressions of a stable, norm-governed, and tradition-bound
    classical practice

*_
Timeline_*
*Abstract submission deadline*
Prospective contributors are invited to submit abstracts of between 350 
and 500 words, along with a brief biography (150 words) and a 
provisional title, to the editor at (m.mckenna /at/ sheffield.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(m.mckenna /at/ sheffield.ac.uk)> by September 1, 2026. Abstracts 
should outline the proposed argument, the primary case study or studies, 
and the methodological approach. If applicable, please indicate any 
archival or primary source materials you intend to draw upon.

*Notification of acceptance*
Contributors will be notified of the editor’s decision within six weeks 
of the abstract deadline, by October 15, 2026. Accepted contributors 
will receive the collection's style sheet and contributor guidelines at 
this stage.

*First draft submission*
Complete first drafts of between 6,000 and 8,000 words (including notes 
and bibliography) should be submitted to the editor by June 1, 2027.

*Editorial feedback*
Contributors will receive detailed editorial feedback on their first 
drafts within sixteen weeks of submission, by September 1, 2027. Where 
appropriate, the editor may also facilitate peer exchange between 
contributors at this stage.

*Revised manuscript submission*
Revised manuscripts, incorporating the editors' feedback and fully 
conforming to the collection's style sheet, should be submitted by 
December 1, 2027.
At this stage, essays should be in near-final form.

Final manuscript submitted to publisher by year end
The editor aims to submit the completed manuscript to the publisher by 
December 31, 2027.

Contact:
Mark McKenna <(m.mckenna /at/ SHEFFIELD.AC.UK)>


*Works Cited*
Biskind, Peter. (1998) Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the 
Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Simon 
& Schuster, p. 18.
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger (1985) ‘Since 1960: the persistence of a 
mode of film practice’, in Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet, Thompson, 
Kristen (eds) The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of 
Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press.
Elsaesser, Thomas. (2004) 'American Auteur Cinema: The Last — or First — 
Great Picture Show.' In Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel 
King (eds), The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema 
in the 1970s. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,p. 46; p. 63.
Haskell, Molly. (2019) 'The Mad Housewives of the Neo-Woman's Film: The 
Age of Ambivalence Revisited.' In Kirshner and Lewis (eds), When the 
Movies Mattered. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 18.
King, Geoff. (2002) New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. London: I.B. 
Tauris / New York: Columbia University Press, p. 4; p. 13.
Kirshner, Jonathan and Jon Lewis. (2019) 'Introduction: The New 
Hollywood Revisited.' In Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis (eds), When the 
Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell University 
Press, p. 8; p. 17.
Krämer, Peter and Yannis Tzioumakis. (2018) 'Introduction.' In Peter 
Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis (eds), The Hollywood Renaissance: 
Revisiting American Cinema's Most Celebrated Era. New York: Bloomsbury 
Academic, p. xiv; p. xv.
Langford, Barry. (2010) Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style 
and Ideology Since 1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 13.
Lopate, Phillip. (2019) 'Coda: What "Golden Age"? A Dissenting Opinion.' 
In Kirshner and Lewis (eds), When the Movies Mattered. Ithaca: Cornell 
University Press, p. 165; p. 167.
Miriam Bratu Hansen (1999) 'The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical 
Cinema as Vernacular Modernism', Modernism/Modernity 6.2, pp. 59–77.

**

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