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Anna C. Sloan's Thesis

Imperial Hollywood: American Cinematic Representations of Europe, 1947-1964

Anna's thesis examines 'tourist films' of the post-war period: Hollywood films about Americans travelling abroad in Europe. These films offer a vicarious experience of tourism, displaying Europe as a fantasy holiday locale which functions as an 'other' to postwar American society: a space for the expression of desires and fears repressed from American domesticity.

I explore these tourist films as an American imperial cinema, showing the way Hollywood envisioned Europe as an economic, military and cultural colony, dependent on America for stability and development yet simultaneously imagined as either a utopian or a dystopian 'other' space.

In doing so, I aim to bring the film text into the discussion of American imperialism since 1945, understanding Hollywood's representations of distant locations as imperial cinema rather than, as previous authors have done, focusing on the political and economic arguments for Hollywood's involvement in American imperialism.

Three Coins in the Fountain

Three Coins in the Fountain (Jean Negulesco, Fox, 1954)

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Anna C. Sloan

a dot c dot sloan at warwick dot ac dot uk

annacsloan at gmail dot com