UCL Film Studies

Presented by Charlie Keil - Director of the Cinema Studies Institute and Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto.

Central to the institutional consolidation of cinema by the 1920s was the irrefutable status of “Hollywood” as the place where movies were made.  But how did this alignment of place with an appropriate set of meanings become entrenched?  And why was it important that the public come to associate “Hollywood” with a prescribed range of often contradictory values, encompassing glamour, scandal, hard work, and aspiration? 

By examining a variety of texts that collectively build up an identity for Hollywood that comes to form the core of an enduring public mythos, this presentation will reveal the work involved in constructing a symbolic site to substitute for an actual industry and a meaning-laden space for a geographic locale.

Charlie Keil is currently a faculty fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute, Toronto. He has published extensively on the topic of early cinema, including Early American Cinema in Transition: American Cinema's Transitional Era (co-edited with Shelley Stamp); and American Cinema of the 1910s (co-edited with Ben Singer).  His latest book is an anthology entitled Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood, to be published by University of California Press in August.  His current project investigates the origins of Hollywood.

Enquiries: l.grieveson@ucl.ac.uk