AVANT-DOC: INTERSECTIONS OF AVANT-GARDE CINEMA

Abstract

©2020 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois a productive metaphor for understanding Hollywood itself. In Hudson’s words, “Hollywood comes to resemble a vampire that shifts shape, moves at unnatural speeds, and multiplies. Like a vampire, Hollywood mutates and migrates, sometimes escaping recognition. Like a vampire, Hollywood has an insatiable appetite and will likely also never die” (3). These parallels emphasize for Hudson that Hollywood needs to be understood as a transnational system, varying from studios to independent productions and from TV networks, cable, and streaming platforms to media conglomerates. Like vampire stories, Hollywood modes of production and distribution are deeply transnational, through outsourced and runaway production, absorption of foreign styles and talent, and the targeting of international markets. Hudson’s book draws on the previous multidisciplinary scholarship to offer three major contributions: first, conceptualization of Hollywood as transnational, as exemplified in the production of vampire film, television, and Web series and their distribution and transmission; second, an approach to vampire film and media as transgenre and transmedia, investigating not only their visual and narrative tropes across genres but also their political meanings; and finally, through reading vampire films for critical pleasure, an analysis that establishes race as a mutable yet ever-present category, constitutive of the fabric of daily life and national history in the United States. Thus, unusually for a book about vampire film and television, Hudson makes a contribution to the literature on race and race relations, as well as to literature about Hollywood and its transnational iterations.