Bücher von Gabor Gergely

This book analyses the uses of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a foreign star in Hollywood through a film philosophical, de-westernizing and sonic critical framework. It offers very close readings of the film texts, of the roles Schwarzenegger performs, and the rhetorical strategies he adopts outside his film performances to show that in spite of attempts to occupy the position of an emblematic member of the U.S. national body Schwarzenegger remains irrevocably outside as an accented migrant body continuously accumulating markers of belonging that by their very necessity attest to their insufficiency. The book¿s central project is to trace back, from the uses to which a migrant star such as Schwarzenegger is put on the screen, the construction of a sense or idea of a U.S. national community through the cinema. Given that the appeal to the American myth of an immigrant nation that promises to erase difference is fundamental to the Schwarzenegger star persona, the central aim of this book isto explore the uses of his stardom as an embodiment of the promise of America and its contradictions and exclusions.

Foreign Devils investigates representations of exile in Hollywood cinema from 1930 to 1956 through the films of Peter Lorre, Bela Lugosi, and Conrad Veidt. This book dispels the assumption that by virtue of its hegemonic, reactionary, and exclusionary modes of representation, otherness is excluded from or only obliquely alluded to in classical Hollywood cinema.