At its most ambitious, the New Hollywood was a movement intended to cut film free of its evil twin, commerce, enabling it to fly high through the thin air of art. The filmmakers of the '70s hoped to overthrow the studio system, or at least render it irrelevant, by democratizing filmmaking, putting it into the hands of anyone with talent and determination.

 The quotation above forms part of the introduction to Peter Biskind's popular history of the Hollywood Renaissance, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998, 18), in which he presents a narrative as compelling as it is reductive: the romantic story of a generation of visionary filmmakers who wrested cinema from the controlling grip of the studios and who, for one brief and glorious decade, elevated it into the realms of art. It is also, as this collection will demonstrate, a myth — an oversimplification that elevated the contributions of the New Hollywood while simultaneously working to erode an understanding of the artistic contributions of the classical period.
The Hollywood Renaissance is typically conceived as the period from the release of Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) to the arrival of the blockbuster in the mid-to-late 1970s. It is among the most celebrated and written-about periods in American film history, and the appeal is not difficult to understand. For Biskind, this was 'the last time it was really exciting to make movies in Hollywood, the last time people could be consistently proud of the pictures they made, the last time the community as a whole encouraged good work, the last time there was an audience that could sustain it' (1998, 18). As Geoff King observes, the period 'has gained almost mythical status in the annals of Hollywood' history, and 'is often taken as a benchmark for measuring the state of Hollywood in subsequent decades' (2002, 13), having already reshaped our perception of the period that preceded it.
Scholarly literature has done much to sustain this mythology. In surveying the critical landscape fifty years on, Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis observe that ‘the verdict of cinephiles, critics and scholars about the period would appear to be almost unanimous: the late 1960s and early 1970s were indeed a kind of golden age in American film history, with a wide range of formally and thematically challenging films made’ (2018, p. xiv). This is a view reflected in Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis’s account in which they suggest, through barely concealed nostalgia, that the New Hollywood ‘was in its day embraced with an intellectual energy unthinkable with regard to these newer new Hollywood’s,’ lamenting that ‘we have, for sure, lost the vitality, the originality, the film culture of this golden age’ (2019, 7, 16). Molly Haskell, writing in the same collection, distils the period’s ambition to the observation that: ‘for one brief moment, it was the best of all worlds: American directors got to make European films with Hollywood money but without studio restraints’ (2019, 18).
At the centre of most celebratory accounts is the figure of the director-as-auteur: the untried artist, influenced by European filmmaking, and emboldened by the collapse of the Production Code and the fragmentation of the studio system. In popular histories, it is within this space that these artists turn Hollywood against itself to produce formally adventurous, morally ambiguous, and politically engaged cinema.
In an influential account, Thomas Elsaesser identified that for him, the hallmark of the New Hollywood protagonist was an inability to pursue a goal or respond to a challenge — what he called ‘the pathos of failure’ — a narrative mode that aligned American cinema for the first time with the conventions of the European art film (2004, 279). For Elsaesser, the crucial distinction between the classical and the New Hollywood auteur was ideological as much as it was formal: ‘where the latter makes his voice heard within the system and its many constraints, the former sets himself off against the system’ (2004, p. 46). That oppositionality — between the system and the artist, between the generic and the personal, between commerce and art, between the classical and the post-classical — is the foundational myth that Before the Renaissance sets out to disrupt through a reconsideration of the artistry of the films of the classical studio period; measured through the characteristics that are perceived to separate the New Hollywood from its predecessors.
In the most polemical accounts of the Renaissance — most notably Biskind’s — the implicit corollary of the rupture narrative is a diminished account of the studio era, in which production is reduced to a factory-like regime of creative constraint whose products, however technically accomplished, could never be art: they were structurally incapable of the formal experimentation, narrative ambiguity, or ideological complexity that came to define the Renaissance. Most contemporary scholars would not accept so stark a caricature, and the historiography of the period has become considerably more nuanced since Biskind wrote his polemical account. Yet something of that foundational belief — that the studio system was, at best, an unlikely host for artistic ambition — persists, however implicitly, in the most celebratory accounts of the New Hollywood, and it is this residual presumption that the collection seeks to interrogate. A canonisation that has worked to distort the perception of the classical period and, in the popular imagination at least, has cast the studio system as the enemy of artistic endeavour — the very thing that needed to be overthrown to make room for the generation of artists that would follow.
There are, however, significant challenges to this narrative. Geoff King has observed that ‘sweeping definitions of “New” Hollywood as something entirely different overlook important continuities and are often based on simplified generalizations about the earlier period’ (2002, 2). Moreover, Krämer and Tzioumakis detail how ‘claims about there being something fundamentally new in American cinema had been made with astonishing regularity from the late 1940s onwards’, with critics variously identifying a ‘new maturity’, the ‘New Movie’, a ‘new art of the movies’, and ‘America’s “new wave”’ — all in relation to films made between the late 1940s and the early 1960s (2018, p. xv).
As for the studio system itself, Barry Langford is clear that its dismissal as a merely commercial enterprise fundamentally misrepresents the artistry of the work that was actually produced: ‘this was an industry capable of producing a rich stream of technically and artistically outstanding work that was also, despite the system’s factory-like approach, richly varied in tone and content’ (2010, 13). Critic Phillip Lopate, writing in the collection When the Movies Mattered, goes one step further, arguing that ‘Hollywood had already achieved a golden age’ in the classical period, citing Ford, Ray, Preminger, Sirk, Hitchcock, and Cukor as evidence of that achievement. Lopate insists that the formal achievements of the studio era — cinema that was brought to ‘a high polish with the wide-screen Cinemascope of the fifties and early sixties… represented a standard the Renaissance frequently failed to meet (2019, 165–166). Similarly, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, scholars most closely associated with the study of classical era Hollywood, argue that, for all of the claims made about the Renaissance, none of the New Hollywood directors ‘significantly changed the mode of film production’, and that ‘the classical style remains the dominant model for feature filmmaking’ (1985, 370). This collection takes these challenges seriously and follows them to their logical conclusion, gathering essays that seek to recover a body of formally ambitious, narratively complex, and ideologically challenging filmmaking produced under the perceived “constraints” of the classical studio system between the early 1920s and the late 1960s. These chapters will demonstrate how the aesthetic features most commonly associated with the Hollywood Renaissance — moral ambiguity, the unmotivated or failing protagonist, the loosening of cause-and-effect narrative resolution, the visible inscription of a directorial personality, and the uneasy negotiation of genre conventions — were neither invented by the New Hollywood nor dependent upon the dismantling of the Production Code or the fragmentation of the studio system for their existence. They were, rather, part of an extant mode of production that was simply rearticulated by Renaissance era directors.
Before the Renaissance invites scholars to look again at the films produced under the studio system and to ask what formal ambitions, what narrative experiments, what acts of ideological resistance or complexity were possible — and achieved — before the rupture that, in most popular histories, first made Hollywood art cinema possible.
We invite contributions that take the opportunity to interrogate periodisation and scrutinise the categorisations of the classical and post-classical period (New Hollywood, Renaissance), As Geoff King observes, 'the term "classical" itself' is a label that ‘was largely elaborated post-hoc, an object defined in terms of its apparent disappearance or modification' (King, 2002, p. 7). We are interested in whether the notion of a 'classical period' has been productive or has itself limited debate, contributing to a discursive binary in which the films of the studio era are positioned as stable and tradition-bound— the conservative counterpart to the radicalism of the Renaissance. This is an open question and one this collection actively invites its contributors to address; reorientating our understanding of the emerging film industry as something more dynamic, experimental, and 'modernist' in its approach. This modernist approach is evident in its engagement with new technologies, enabling of new narrative forms, and its representation of new social realities. This discursive shift would allow for a reconceptualization that repositions the studio system not as the obstacle to artistic ambition but as the crucible in which cinema's modernist possibilities were realised. Or in Miriam Bratu Hansen's terms, that Classical Hollywood cinema was not the antithesis of modernism but a form of it, or what Hansen suggested should be understood as a 'vernacular modernism' — a mass-produced, industrially organised cultural form that mediated, articulated, and reflected upon the experience of modernity for a global audience (Hansen, 1999, 66, 64).
The editor welcomes essay proposals from scholars across film, media and cultural studies and adjacent disciplines, and is particularly interested in work that combines close formal analysis with production history, industrial or archival research, and critical and theoretical approaches to the directors, producers, films and filmmaking practices of the classical studio era.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Case studies of formally ambitious or aesthetically experimental films produced within the classical studio system (approximately 1920– late-1960s), with particular attention to narrative ambiguity, tonal complexity, or the disruption of generic convention
• The figure of the studio-era director as artist or proto-auteur: creative autonomy, personal style, and the negotiation of industrial constraint within the classical system
• The role of producers, cinematographers, screenwriters, editors, and other creative collaborators in enabling aesthetic experiment under the studio system — approaches that move beyond director-centred models of authorship
• Émigré filmmakers and the transfusion of European artistic sensibilities — expressionism, realism, art cinema — into classical Hollywood production
• Censorship, the Production Code, and the relationship between institutional constraint and narrative or aesthetic complexity: what the Code enabled as well as what it prohibited
• Genre mutation, subversion, and hybridity in classical Hollywood: the western, the melodrama, the film noir, the woman's film, and others as vehicles for ideological instability or formal experiment
• Classical Hollywood and European art cinema: influence and exchange across the studio era, including the work of directors who moved between American and European production contexts
• Industry, economics, and aesthetics: how the studio system's modes of production — unit production, the contract system, the B picture — shaped and enabled as well as constrained creative practice
• Stars, performance, and the body: the ways in which studio-era performance practice registered psychological complexity, moral ambiguity, or social critique
• Gender, race, sexuality, and class in classical Hollywood: films of the studio era that contested, complicated, or exceeded the ideological frameworks within which they were produced
• The reception history of classical Hollywood: how films of the studio era were read by contemporary critics, and how critical frameworks — auteurism, feminism, psychoanalysis, ideological critique — have subsequently transformed our understanding of the period
• Archival and historical approaches to classical Hollywood production: new findings from studio archives, production records, censorship files, and other primary sources that revise our understanding of the aesthetic ambitions of the period
• Pre-Code Hollywood (1927–1934) as a zone of formal and ideological experiment, and its relationship to subsequent production under the Code
• The relationship between classical Hollywood and other American cinemas of the period: exploitation, independent, documentary, and avant-garde production as contexts for understanding the limits and possibilities of studio filmmaking
• Methodological and historiographical essays that consider the relationship between classical Hollywood scholarship and the history of the Hollywood Renaissance, and the critical frameworks through which both periods have been understood
• Essays that interrogate the critical and historiographical boundaries drawn between the classical studio era and the Hollywood Renaissance, examining the continuities, precursors, and transitional figures that complicate the narrative of rupture — including work on the ‘long 1950s’, the decline of the studio system, and the industrial and aesthetic conditions that made the Renaissance possible
• The term ‘classical’ itself as a site of critical inquiry: essays that question whether the label — largely constructed post-hoc by Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson — adequately describes the formal and aesthetic range of Hollywood filmmaking between the 1920s and the 1960s, and that consider whether the films of the studio era might be more productively understood as ‘modernist’ — engaged with new technologies, new narrative possibilities, and the social and cultural transformations of the twentieth century — rather than as expressions of a stable, norm-governed, and tradition-bound classical practice

Timeline
Abstract submission deadline
Prospective contributors are invited to submit abstracts of between 350 and 500 words, along with a brief biography (150 words) and a provisional title, to the editor at m.mckenna@sheffield.ac.uk by September 1, 2026. Abstracts should outline the proposed argument, the primary case study or studies, and the methodological approach. If applicable, please indicate any archival or primary source materials you intend to draw upon.
Notification of acceptance
Contributors will be notified of the editor’s decision within six weeks of the abstract deadline, by October 15, 2026. Accepted contributors will receive the collection's style sheet and contributor guidelines at this stage.
First draft submission
Complete first drafts of between 6,000 and 8,000 words (including notes and bibliography) should be submitted to the editor by June 1, 2027.
Editorial feedbackContributors will receive detailed editorial feedback on their first drafts within sixteen weeks of submission, by September 1, 2027. Where appropriate, the editor may also facilitate peer exchange between contributors at this stage.
Revised manuscript submission
Revised manuscripts, incorporating the editors' feedback and fully conforming to the collection's style sheet, should be submitted by December 1, 2027.
At this stage, essays should be in near-final form.
Final manuscript submitted to publisher by year end
The editor aims to submit the completed manuscript to the publisher by December 31, 2027.  Please reach out if you would like to discuss potential contributions. Best wishesMark  
Works Cited
Biskind, Peter. (1998) Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 18.
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger (1985) ‘Since 1960: the persistence of a mode of film practice’, in Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet, Thompson, Kristen (eds) The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press.
Elsaesser, Thomas. (2004) 'American Auteur Cinema: The Last — or First — Great Picture Show.' In Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel King (eds), The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,p. 46; p. 63.
Haskell, Molly. (2019) 'The Mad Housewives of the Neo-Woman's Film: The Age of Ambivalence Revisited.' In Kirshner and Lewis (eds), When the Movies Mattered. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 18.
King, Geoff. (2002) New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. London: I.B. Tauris / New York: Columbia University Press, p. 4; p. 13.
Kirshner, Jonathan and Jon Lewis. (2019) 'Introduction: The New Hollywood Revisited.' In Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis (eds), When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 8; p. 17.
Krämer, Peter and Yannis Tzioumakis. (2018) 'Introduction.' In Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis (eds), The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema's Most Celebrated Era. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, p. xiv; p. xv.
Langford, Barry. (2010) Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style and Ideology Since 1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 13.
Lopate, Phillip. (2019) 'Coda: What "Golden Age"? A Dissenting Opinion.' In Kirshner and Lewis (eds), When the Movies Mattered. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 165; p. 167.
Miriam Bratu Hansen (1999) 'The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism', Modernism/Modernity 6.2, pp. 59–77.