Contenu du sommaire : Images de l'Amérique dans le cinéma américain.

The movie industry, which sees itself as a mass product, tried to leave New York in the 1910s. This paper first analyzes the reasons of the choice of Hollywood by setting forth the traditional geographic criteria (landscape, weather), but also by insisting on the economic, social and cultural criteria. Then it traces the influences of movies on Los Angeles and its architecture. The conclusion deals with the perenniality of Hollywood as capital of the movie industry (in spite of the globalization of this economic sector). Its argument is based on the assumption that Hollywood is an a-historical urban context.

Starting from the well-known idea that Hollywood is dominated by the major companies whose purpose is to make money rather than art, while on the other hand, independent movie-makers are mostly interested in art, regardless of their bank account, this paper intends to show the interconnections between the two systems and the complexity of the problem. The basic question is to know what « independent » means. And how independent companies can finance their films and distribute them through the three key distribution markets : movie theaters, video networks, and foreign country markets.

New York is at the core of the works of Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. Their relationships to the city they love are, however, basically different. Scorsese's mise en scene brings out the conflict between the city and the often marginal antagonists in search of themselves and of success ; Woody Allen's protagonists tell about their perfect urban integration. The two visions of the city may not be superimposed. Scorsese's camera, starting from Little Italy, explores all five Boroughs ; Allen feels more comfortable in Manhattan, especially around Central Park, with occasional excursions to Brooklyn. Both film-makers use the roofs of NY in similar ways, in homage to the Hollywood tradition. Yet they diverge in their original uses of bridges, the El, and the Manhattan skyline. Two contrasting symbolic images emerge. Allen's small town, filmed and loved as a woman, is a unique place where nature is integrated into the heart of civilization. In Scorsese's NY, there is no place for couples ; it is a city not unlike LA, an abstract asphalt jungle which comes to symbolize all cities.

Most films considered here belong to the Hollywood classical cinema : their aim is to entertain a large audience through a double plot (love story + adventure story) for which they first use San Francisco as a background without changing it. This implies two levels of representation : the photographic pictures, partly shot in LA studios, are traces of an objective reality that, in its turn, the story invests with specific meanings. The opening sequence of The Birds, for instance, includes real pictures of cable cars in Union Square but they also introduce a special way of looking at them that connects birds with Melanie's physical presence. This leads to the question asked in this paper : what is the influence of San Francisco's actual as well as mythical history — and the use Fiction has made of them — on the images the films convey ?

American science fiction movies generally contain the most achieved and suggestive urban fantasies. All representations of the American city in such movies mostly depend on two components : Myth and History. Symbolized as the achievement of a noble Humanity, the city is often presented as suffering form the harsh assaults of a hostile and alien identity : monsters, or extraterrestrial beings. A second representation, depicting the cities under nightmarish features, came later and is to be related to the recent evolution of American cities. In such movies as Blade Runner, Invasion Los Angeles, Terminator, or Robocop, the enemy is no more an extraneous entity, but it spreads out from the corrupted heart of the decaying city, and one can see in this interiorization of the evil forces threatening the city dwellers the long way covered since the confident days of the consumer society to the present-day fears of American life.

Science fiction films show New York City through the eyes of a foreigner, an « alien », be it an extraterrestrial, an earthly monster or a super-hero. The alien's presence in the city underscores the shortcomings of civilization — New York is ridden by violence, crime and corruption — while reinforcing the mythical appeal of the world's most recognizable city. The various images of New York on the screen actually give us a glimpse of the « real » city, as the cinema blends all visions into a unique, multi-sided, mythical entity, a city that draws its reality from the fiction that invents it.

Tennessee Williams disliked all the film adaptations of his plays even though they were all made by the most prestigious directors and produced by the major companies. The paper examines the various ways in which scriptwriters and directors transformed Williams's Broadway plays into movies aimed at the general public — from the rather faithful rendition of the theatre play to the more cinematic « opened up » version. Comparing and contrasting the plays and the films, the paper analyzes the consequences of the deletion or addition of scenes, characters and dialogues, and of censorship or self-censorship.