Dylan Price 5-5-14
FMS103: American Cinema from 1966-1977
Final Paper
The time from the mid-1960s to 1970s was a highly transitional period in American film culture. The breakdown of the Classical Hollywood system spawned a new generation of forward-thinking filmmakers and new filmmaking aesthetics that reflected the changing methods of film production and shifts in audience tastes. Simultaneously, the social and cultural landscapes of America were beginning to transform producing what became a divergent, self-reliant, and free-spirited generation of youth that sought a break from their past to forge their own unbridled and autonomous lifestyles. This dissenting class of youth, affected by the sobering American experiences of both foreign and domestic conflict in the 60s, became largely numb to the ideologies of hope, ambition, and progress that their predecessors promoted and instead channeled a message of cynicism, purposelessness, and both social and moral failure.
Two seminal movies made in this era that reflect these themes of independence and failure are the 1970 film Five Easy Pieces directed by Bob Rafelson and the 1971 Two Lane Blacktop directed by Monte Hellman. Five Easy Pieces depicts an oilrig worker named Bobby Dupea, who is unfulfilled by his bourgeois upbringing, yet equally unfulfilled with the working class life he flees to. He seeks social independence from his predecessors, yet winds up deeply conflicted and lost in the process. Two Lane Blacktop depicts a similar anti-hero narrative of inconsequential action and futility shown by the two main characters who travel aimless across the country, challenging strangers to drag races, with no apparent place to call a home. The main characters f...
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...nd The Driver "are waiting for the end, convinced that it is too late for action, as if too many contradictions had cancelled the impulse towards meaning and purpose".2 The two anti-heroes end their stories driving off into the endless distance, socially detached and emotionally empty. In Two Lane Blacktop, rather than ending the final race, the film itself slows to a halt and the image bursts into flames, effectively ending the movie without resolution.
As can be seen from the analysis above, both Five Easy Pieces and Two Lane Blacktop grappled with the sequential themes of independence and failure. These ideologies both reflected and commented on the national trends that American film and American society as a whole experienced in the late 60s, and led to a new realist trend of pessimistic narratives that became widely embraced by the empathetic American public.
In the article “Twoness in the style of Oscar Micheaux” by J. Ronald Green critiques the common theme of twoness which was a common debilitating dilemma for black film in America concerning American Social Codes. African Americans face the possibility of two identities at the same time but somehow resolve individually for her or himself. The point is made that African Americans are American citizens, but are hindered by the color line which sets them up to be positioned to understand two sides to the American hegemony. Hegemony consists of leadership or domination, either by one country or social group over others. American black cinema acquiesced in segregation, placed white cupidity off limits as theme, rehashed white Hollywood stereotypes
In “The Thematic Paradigm,” University of Florida professor of film studies, Robert Ray, defines two types of heroes pervading American films, the outlaw hero and the official hero. Often the two types are merged in a reconciliatory pattern, he argues. In fact, this
The road movie embodies the human desire for travel and progression. The vehicle of journey is a contemporary metaphor of personal transformation that oftentimes mirrors socio-cultural desires and fears. Thomas Schatz believes that one “cannot consider either the filmmaking process or films themselves in isolation from their economic, technological, and industrial context.” This statement is especially applicable to the independent American films of the late sixties, a time of great political and social debate. Easy Rider (1969) was considered a new voice in film that was pitched against the mainstream. In the 1960s, there was a shift to highlight the outsiders or the anti-heros in film. This counter-cultural radicalism seems to have also influenced the 1991 film, Thelma & Louise. The characters of both films act as figures of anti-heroism by rebelling against the conventional and unintentionally discovering themselves at the same time. Despite their different backgrounds, the protagonists of Eas...
Lewis, J. (2008). American Film: A History. New York, NY. W.W. Norton and Co. Inc. (p. 405,406,502).
By adapting the standard Hollywood ‘road’ movie narrative (east to west), incorporating modern music as non-diegetic sound and utilizing shocking scenes – both socially and in terms of ignoring every written and unwritten filming law - Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider stands as a testament to the changes going on in the US during the late 1960s and creates a certain distance to the previous way of seeing America.
The postmodern cinema emerged in the 80s and 90s as a powerfully creative force in Hollywood film-making, helping to form the historic convergence of technology, media culture and consumerism. Departing from the modernist cultural tradition grounded in the faith in historical progress, the norms of industrial society and the Enlightenment, the postmodern film is defined by its disjointed narratives, images of chaos, random violence, a dark view of the human state, death of the hero and the emphasis on technique over content. The postmodernist film accomplishes that by acquiring forms and styles from the traditional methods and mixing them together or decorating them. Thus, the postmodern film challenges the “modern” and the modernist cinema along with its inclinations. It also attempts to transform the mainstream conventions of characterization, narrative and suppresses the audience suspension of disbelief. The postmodern cinema often rejects modernist conventions by manipulating and maneuvering with conventions such as space, time and story-telling. Furthermore, it rejects the traditional “grand-narratives” and totalizing forms such as war, history, love and utopian visions of reality. Instead, it is heavily aimed to create constructed fictions and subjective idealisms.
The American film industry’s early attempts at the narrative Western were limited and in the early years were produced mainly in the east. During this early time in the film industry the...
Maasik, Sonia, and J. Fisher Solomon. "The Offensive Movie Cliche That Won't die." Signs of life in the U.S.A.: readings on popular culture for writers. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1994. 407-411. Print.
Classic narrative cinema is what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The classic Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University press 1985) 1, calls “an excessively obvious cinema”1 in which cinematic style serves to explain and not to obscure the narrative. In this way it is made up of motivated events that lead the spectator to its inevitable conclusion. It causes the spectator to have an emotional investment in this conclusion coming to pass which in turn makes the predictable the most desirable outcome. The films are structured to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude, which is to give a perception of reality. On closer inspection it they are often far from realistic in a social sense but possibly portray a realism desired by the patriarchal and family value orientated society of the time. I feel that it is often the black and white representation of good and evil that creates such an atmosphere of predic...
One could easily dismiss movies as superficial, unnecessarily violent spectacles, although such a viewpoint is distressingly pessimistic and myopic. In a given year, several films are released which have long-lasting effects on large numbers of individuals. These pictures speak
A new edition to the course lineup, this week's film classic, Sunset Boulevard. This film will focus on the culture and environment of the Hollywood studio system that produces the kind of motion pictures that the whole world recognizes as "Hollywood movies." There have been many movies from the silent era to the present that either glamorize or vilify the culture of Hollywood, typically focusing on the celebrities (both in front of and behind the camera) who populate the "dream factories" of Hollywood. But we cannot completely understand the culture of Hollywood unless we recognize that motion pictures are big business as well as entertainment, and that Hollywood necessarily includes both creative and commercial
In this essay the following will be discussed; the change from the age of classical Hollywood film making to the new Hollywood era, the influence of European film making in American films from Martin Scorsese and how the film Taxi Driver shows the innovative and fresh techniques of this ‘New Hollywood Cinema’.
Stanley, Robert H. The Movie Idiom: Film as a Popular Art Form. Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc. 2011. Print
In this paper I will offer a structural analysis of the films of Simpson and Bruckheimer. In addition to their spectacle and typically well-crafted action sequences, Simpson/Bruckheimer pictures seem to possess an unconscious understanding of the zeitgeist and other cultural trends. It is this almost innate ability to select scripts that tap into some traditional American values (patriotism, individualism, and the obsession with the “new”) that helps to make their movies blockbusters.
Due to the new ratings system, filmmakers were enabled to seek inspiration beyond the restriction of the Production Code. Breaking away from the limited and implicit elaboration of two-sided characters such as the outlaw heroes against official heroes (Ray 1985, p. 59), the reconciliatory combination of moral ambiguity and complexity into one thus became the salient characteristic that divided experimentation and avant-garde films from the typical melodramatic investigation between the good and evil. (King 2002, p. 32) A common phenomenon in Hollywood Renaissance is the use of marginalized individuals as the main character. Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver is a disturbed individual devoured by loneliness and moral mysophobia; McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) is a criminal not understood by the society, battling authority in a mental institution; in Harold and Maude