Men’s Cinema: Masculinity and Mise-en-scene in Hollywood

This is the first full-length study of masculinity and film style. Cinema is not just an intellectual or cerebral experience. They also make us feel: especially popular movies. This is a book about one aspect of how cinema makes us feel as well as think. Although all these aspects are interwined, Men’s Cinema is about identification as well as analysis, about mise-en-scene alongside representation and narrative. Men’s Cinema reflects on how we as spectators are invited to understand, desire or identify with Hollywood’s vision of men and masculinity via mise-en-scene, from the classical era to the present day, and how more recently Hollywood has built up and refined the ‘language’ of ‘men’s cinema’ via a series of recurrent, refined tropes that evoke masculinity, from a posse of men walking – often in slow motion – towards the camera to the ecstatically fast editing of the classic action sequence. It offers a new theorisation of men in Hollywood cinema via close textual analysis. It is structured around case studies which exemplify and illustrate the distinctive aspects and tropes of men’s cinema. It is written in an accessible style.

Reviews of Men’s Cinema: Masculinity and Mise-en-scene in Hollywood

'Stella Bruzzi's new book makes a welcome intervention in the fields of film and gender studies. Skillfully building upon classic works on the construction of male identity on screen, she nevertheless provides a completely new focus on the topic, offering a valuable addition to existing scholarship on this most crucial issue.' – Elisabetta Girelli, Scottish Journal of Performance