Classical Hollywood as an Epistemological Network

Perhaps no other medium has been described, analyzed, and understood in relation to other media as much as film has been. Theatre, photography, and magic provided a framework for understanding the intermediality of film as an exchange between people, objects, and techniques. In what follows the author shall leave aside the peculiarities of these entities, and shall instead regard them as equivalent containers of knowledge—a reduction that resembles Bruno Latour‟s concept of an ontological symmetry of human and non-human actors (Latour, 1996). The attempt to describe Hollywood around 1930 as an epistemological network raises the questions of how much external knowledge was necessary and how much was digestible to support the development of a relatively young medium like film at that time? The author shall claim that Hollywood progressively excluded external “actors” and therefore was forced to establish its own structures in order to compensate this loss or integrate knowledge on its own terms. The factor that most people working in the industry did not have higher or specialized education proved to be favorable for achieving independence. Autonomy here means self-referentiality as opposed to intermediality.