Contenu du sommaire : Hollywood au miroir.

Introduction. The Film on Hollywood : A Cinematographic Genre ? Art looking at itself : an age-old tradition. The great abundance of films on Hollywood and their frequent commercial failures. Relationships with the literature on Hollywood. The notion of genre in relation to the film on Hollywood. The interrelationships between reality and fiction. Genre and myth. Hollywood as a closed community.

Merton Gill, an Ordinary Man in the Cinema of the Twenties. A nearly forgotten novel of the early Twenties is discussed in these pages. Merton of the Movies by Harry Leon Wilson had got such a wide success that it was adapted on the stage before becoming a film. Its title was so successful that there were many Mary of the Movies, Polly of the Movies and so on during the Gilded Decade... And its hero, Merton Gill, one of the most unknown citizens of the little town of Sinsbury, Illinois can be considered as the emblematic figure of the movie-made man of the period. A Movie fan, he likes westerns and his idol is the strong silent man of the wide open spaces as he was illustrated on the silver screen by William S. Hart. He wants to be a star in Hollywood, so he makes the big journey. His story is that of a great disillusion. A biting irony wants him to be a star of the slapstick comedy. He is sentenced to burlesque his heroes. « You know what ? I'm happy » could have been his motto. Had Tex Avery read the H.L. Wilson's novel ? We cannot tell, but Morty S. Tashman, the central figure of The Errand Boy, is surely the duplicate of Merton. To the question : How to break into the Movies ? They find that the best answer is being a simpleton.

Among the significant American authors who have written about the capitalist, and these are many, there exists a near consensus as to the values necessary to achieve heroism as a capitalist. Yet of all those authors who have written about the capitalist at work in America, it is only F. Scott Fitzgerald who presents the reader with a portrait of a fully realized capitalist hero that would fit this consensus. For as much as The Last Tycoon is a novel about Hollywood, it is equally a novel about capitalism in America. In an important sense The Last Tycoon emerges as an elegy to an America that was and a Fitzgerald who was so much her child.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hollywood : The American Dream Distorted. Attracted since his younger age by the theater, Fitzgerald spent the last four years of his life in Hollywood. The movie industry, in which he could identify the importance of dreaming, the search for illusion and escape, inspired him with ambivalent reactions : he was tempted by the high profits offered to writers, but repelled by its artificiality and its gaudiness. Starting with the concret reality he knew by experience, he ended up making of Hollywood a real myth ; he found in it all the components of the American dream, but distorted to the point of becoming caricatural. Hollywood is thus the necessary outcome of Fitzgerald's writing career in which American dream is the main focus.

Direct and Indirect Reflections : Hollywood Seen by the Musical Film. The musical film used to show its home town in two opposite ways : as seen from Hollywood, Hollywood is the great American get together ; as seen from Broadway seen by Hollywood, it is the one that splits up shows, teams or loving couples. This discrepancy calls for three explanations : first, Hollywood may have some sense of humour ; second, Broadway must be taken as a metaphorical portrait of the artist, stressing the hard job of staging and the exhilaration of performing, thus drawing a mirror image of Hollywood as communion and Hollywood as division ; third, these rules amount to a perfect arrangement, the purpose of which is to restore or to feign, after and in spite of the coming of the talkies, some kind of balance between addresser and addressee of the film, by creating an alter ego of Hollywood.

The Rise and Fall of the Hollywood Star or the Roman Syndrome (from « Show People », 1928 to « Frances », 1982). The American cinema has always been proudly interested in revealing the different ways of making films and this ever since 1908. The making of a star, for instance, was shown for the first time as soon as 1914 in a Warner production titled The Movie Queen. Since then scores of movies have been produced on the subject most of them being quite successful at the box-office such as A Star Is Born or Sunset Boulevard. All those productions have in common a two-sided approach to the star phenomenom. On the one hand they show the meeting of a nobody with a potential Pygmalion that rapidly changes the former into a Cinderella. On the other hand, just like in the gangster movies of the '30s, after rise they show the fall of those modern idols turned undemocratic. But this passage from a Cinderella syndrome to a Nero one has always been treated with a certain ambiguity.

« What did concern me was to extract the essence of the Hollywood film factory and to flash the essentials of a revolution, without being realistic with either. I was an unquestioned authority on Hollywood, and that made it difficult to be unsealistic in picturing it. I felt more at home with the Russian Revolution, for there I was free to use my imagination alone. » (Sternberg). With its contempt for realistic authenticity, The Last Command, based on a film-within-a-film idea, is an attempt, not at delivering a sharp and aloof criticism of the film machinery, but at answering to the Hollywood system in its own terms. By outbidding that system, the film depicts the status of artistic objects in Hollywood. « / doubt if anything as savage has ever been said about it as in The Last Command» (Sternberg).

In Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard {1950) the principal character, Norma Desmond, is driven to madness and murder because she confuses the illusion of film and the reality of life. In its two typically American stories — one involving Norma's comeback and the other focusing on Jeo Gillis' failure as a screenwriter — Wilder's film effectively employs the Hollywood setting to show that neither kindness nor honesty can save its doomed character. Sunset Boulevard incorporates elements of film noir in its essentially realistic style, inverts the established patterns of the backstage movie, and draws upon themes and character types familiar in recent American film and theater.

Hollywood Melodrama : « The Bad and the Beautiful ». Made in 1953 for MGM by Minnelli, The Bad and the Beautiful is in the first place a portrait of the producer Jonathan Shields, who is played by Kirk Douglas. However, this fictitious portrait alludes constantly and consistently to a set of historical facts which are themselves presented in code-form. Whilst Shields refers to David O. Selznick, it is less as an individual than as the prototype of the Hollywood producer. Similarly, the other characters conjure up easily recognizable models as they too are archetypal. Nine years later Minnelli completed a second « self-portrait » of the Hollywood cinema-industry, Two Weeks in Another Town, a film whose originality is twofold : Minnelli quotes excerpts from The Bad and the Beautiful as evidence of a golden age to be emulated ; yet he blurs the meaning of this cross-reference by assigning the main creative role to the director rather than to the producer.

Several observations are made after a brief summary of Robert Aldrich's melodramatic script : 1. The critical reception was influenced by the attitude towards the director's evolution. 2. The film is structured around the systematic and repetitive conflicts between the various representatives of the Hollywood factory. Who is the author of the film : the producer ? the director ? the star ? or the critic caricatured here under the disguise of the Hollywood gossip columnist ? 3. The relation with Jean Renoir who was Aldrich's « boss ». 4. This film on Hollywood goes beyond the anecdotal viewpoint to raise the question of the necessity for a work of art to go through the mirror that separates the real from its representation.

Hollywood Questioned in the Films of the Sixties and Seventies : Fictions, Quotations and Metacinema. In the sixties and early seventies, some American filmmakers, often under the influence of European cinema, considered their own films as means of investigation of the medium itself. Among many devices they used to achieve their purpose, quotations and clips from older films were often inserted to destroy the illusion of reality Hollywood films imposed implicitly on the andience, and to render the presence of the codes and values conveyed by Hollywood productions more obvious. Metacinema is another direction : in their search for liberation from the mesmeric power of traditional film fictions, a more limited number of cretors went further in their questioning of the conventional framework of filmmaking within the Hollywood system, by making all cliches — whether aesthetic, moral or ideological-obtrusive through pastiche and parody (speudo-quotations) or through systematic destruction. The quest of these critical filmmakers is similar to that of Pop Artists in the same decade.

Death in Hollywood. What is the state of American cinema in 1983 ? Such a banal question is here tackled by a European, the German film-maker Wim Wenders, who has been working for some years now in Hollywood, and in particular with Coppola's studio. Wim Wenders intends to assess The State of Things (for such is the title of his film) just as one assess the condition of a newly discovered old house. To do so, he draws upon two technical and cultural trends that have traditionnally separated Old World cinema from New. He depicts Hollywood's narcissitic quest, echoing that of some European artists'. Taking place both along Portugal's peaceful shores, whence The Conquerors left, and in hard rock Los Angeles, as signalled by oil-rigs and Sunset Boulevard, the scenario speeds up from film d'auteur's meandering introspection to the heat and the pulse of the film noir. Caught in these mirrors, two art and world views are shown here mercilessly confronting each other. As dawn breaks, anonymous gunmen shoot to kill, and it's death in Hollywood.