daddy-firth replied to your post “American cinema isn’t necessarily Hollywood cinema. Hollywood cinema...”
So what's the difference then?? 🤔
While Hollywood is often a metonymy for United States cinema, it’s generally more precise, especially when the topic itself is United States cinema, to define Hollywood as a particular style of filmmaking in both an aesthetic and business sense. Hollywood, though, is the largest and most influential American film institution.
Hollywood is a location, an industry, a cultural institution, an aesthetic, and a business model.
I guess it’s worth noting that it’s arguably possible to create a Hollywood film without making it in Los Angeles because of Hollywood’s nature as a style and aesthetic.
There’s very much a pre-Hollywood American film. But, non-Hollywood American film still exists after the establishment of Hollywood. It’s broadly defined as film created outside of the film studio culture and business model, whatever form that takes in a particular era.
The LA Rebellion, a group of African and African American filmmakers coming out of UCLA setting out expressly to work outside the Hollywood system, is an oft-cited example as non-Hollywood American cinema. Film examples are Killer of Sheep, Daughters of the Dust, To Sleep with Anger. John Cassavetes similarly denounced the Hollywood system and, after directing two Hollywood films, explicitly said he would never make another Hollywood film again. (He didn’t.) Experimental film is also firmly non-Hollywood―lack of broad commercial appeal doesn’t make it any less cinema―so that would place American filmmakers like Maya Deren (Meshes of the Afternoon), Andy Warhol, and Bruce Conner (A MOVIE) as creators of non-Hollywood films. It’d generally be argued that Moonlight (2016) is a non-Hollywood film.
I’m generally blanking on specific examples, but Hollywood has a particular business and production model it follows, one that changes somewhat over the course of the decades but still firmly producing each film according to the formula of the day, and it has a particular aesthetic convention, again changing over time but applied consistently to each film. (To outline the model and aesthetic per era would be a long process.) And, any film produced outside of these conventions and practices, if it disregards the style of filmmaking used by Hollywood, it’s produced outside of the Hollywood behemoth.
