In many ways, this book is part of a now-common project to historicise and document the rise of screen studies in the 1970s. But Elsaesser is a dynamic figure whose approach has always been within and outside the contemporary currents of film studies and its dominant theoretical models. So although Elsaesser unsurprisingly refers to and interrogates such concepts and developments as auteurism, psychoanalytic film theory, semiotics, globalisation, and digitisation (as well as how each has been applied to Hollywood), and explores the work of such key theorists as Gilles Deleuze, David Bordwell, Laura Mulvey, Richard Maltby, and Peter Wollen, his argument is always leavened by other approaches and asides, and seldom follows a singular (or always fashionable) theoretical path. His book does betray its piecemeal nature, and some of the essays are certainly more accessible than others, particularly those written in the flashpoint of 1970s film theory. That said, Elsaesser’s initial work on the New Hollywood cinema, particularly his 1975 essay ‘The Pathos of Failure: Notes on the Unmotivated Hero’, is both ground-breaking and essential to contemporary understandings of this much-eulogised ‘movement’. Although the placement of only minimally revised existing essays alongside a small number of new entries leads to some nagging repetition, it is the consistency of Elsaesser’s argument that proves truly remarkable, as well as the ways in which he sympathetically surveys the histories of film criticism.

The Persistence of Hollywood is divided into five overlapping sections. Across these essays Elsaesser covers numerous film-makers, genres, technical and economic aspects of the Hollywood studio system, and the peaks and troughs of dominant paradigms of film studies; but his leitmotif remains the embattled and resilient figure of the auteur and its persistence. Such a core focus is unsurprising within the volume’s earlier essays. Elsaesser first came to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s with a string of essays addressing specific Hollywood film-makers (auteurs) and genres of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Elsaesser’s early essays are situated between the excesses of full-blown auteurist film analysis and the rising tide of semiotics and post-structuralist approaches to the cinema. In many ways, all of his subsequent writing plays on the tension between such fevered expressions of ‘movie love’ and a cooler, more scholarly approach to the medium.

Elsaesser has consistently returned to the subject of cinephilia and its importance as a positive and negative touchstone for both film studies and film-making itself. This preoccupation also allows Elsaesser to evocatively discuss his own emergence as a film scholar and trace the patterns of his cinematic obsession across the geographies of, in his case, Germany, England, and France. The first section of the book is titled ‘Flashback: Of Objects of Love and Objects of Study’, and is bookended by two essays that survey the legacy of 1960s cinephilia and its roots in the varied reception of classical Hollywood cinema, Parisian film culture of the 1950s and 1960s, and its transference to the emergent auteurist film criticism circulating around such important, if short-lived, magazines as The Brighton Film Review (later Monogram, of which Elsaesser was editor).

Although these remain the most clearly autobiographical and self-critical essays in the book, profoundly placing the author within the traditions of British film studies and screen theory, they provide a kind of map to help place the various approaches and obsessions that preoccupy the rest of the volume. It is this background, for example, that helps Elsaesser argue persuasively for the reconfiguration of auteurism in contemporary Hollywood as both a self-conscious identity and a marketing practice. In these sections he traces the continued importance of an attenuated auteurist paradigm to the production and reception of James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). In contrast to common claims about the ‘dumbing down’ of Hollywood since the mid-1970s, Elsaesser argues for a more nuanced and complex understanding that embraces textual ambiguity as well as the forces of globalisation. In a film such as Avatar, he traces multiple points of entry and interpretation, provocatively positioning Cameron’s film within competing ideological and political frameworks.

But Elsaesser is also preoccupied with figures on the fringes of Hollywood. Although he has built a strong legacy of writing on Hollywood cinema, Elsaesser is best known for his work on the German cinema of the 1920s and early 1930s, and on the New German Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, characterised by the films of such directors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog. Unsurprisingly, Elsaesser is also interested in the figure of the exile, the maverick, and what he calls auteurs maudits within Hollywood. As in the rest of his work, the film-makers incorporated within this field are varied in stature, reputation, and approach. His analysis covers such Hollywood institutions as Alfred Hitchcock, less successful but persistent masters such as Fritz Lang, self-styled mavericks as Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman, and largely forgotten figures such as William Dieterle. In many respects, these essays provide the most pleasurable and accessible entries in the book. The chapters on Kubrick and Altman, in particular, are among the best ever published on these mercurial directors.

Although The Persistence of Hollywood contains fascinating analyses of the work of such important postwar film-makers as Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, and Vincente Minnelli, as well as monumental figures such as Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Lang, its greatest contribution lies in its discussion of the New Hollywood cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s, and its continued influence on contemporary cinema. Although Elsaesser does countenance the common view that cites the brief flowering of this extraordinary moment of American film-making – see, for example, Peter Biskind’s salacious book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) – he makes a strong argument for the continued importance of the core film-makers and production and distribution processes that emerged in this period. There is nothing very radical about Elsaesser’s argument – he is not that kind of thinker – but he provides a consistently coherent and detailed account of important developments and continuities across Hollywood cinema. The Persistence of Hollywood provides an exemplary account of the continued importance of studying Hollywood, while also betraying a deep-seated passion for the form.