Five Easy Pieces

Five Easy Pieces: Transgressive Fiction, Heterology, and the BBS Style
The opening image of Five Easy Pieces sets the stage for the introduction of the main character, creates a framework for the development of the story, and creates an unambiguous visual illustration of how the movie exemplifies films made under BBS Productions, the innovative company which produced movies for a short period of time from around the late-1960s to the mid-1970s. BBS contributed several notable films during the period and gained a reputation as main players in the Hollywood Renaissance. The scene combines Classic Hollywood filmmaking, learned in film schools by young first-time directors given total control of their films, with experimental techniques for storytelling and editing inspired by the French New Wave Cinema, along with the

The opening moment of a film is of critical importance to filmmakers and it is often used to set the tone for the rest of the film. In a film with as much to prove as Five Easy Pieces did, the first film produced by BBS under their agreement with Columbia. David Cook, author of “Auteurs Manque and Maudit,” Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979 called Five Easy Pieces “an off-beat character study in the form of a road movie but with the pacing of a European art film” and later adds, “It nearly perfectly fulfilled the BBS mission to inspire a “Hollywood New Wave’ whose métier would be artistically ambitious, low-budget films involving new talent” (109). In the opening moments of Five Easy Pieces, Director Bob Rafelson (one of the Bs in BBS Productions) spear fronts the test of the BBS style and in those first frames of the film he aggressively depicts America as a man and machine, yet, he does so with a decidedly French