When the Movies Mattered

JONATHAN KIRSHNER; JON LEWIS

Description

In When the Movies Mattered Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis gather a remarkable collection of authors to revisit the unique era in American cinema that was New Hollywood. Ten eminent contributors, some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood movement as it unfolded across the 1960s and 1970s, assess the convergence of film-industry developments and momentous social and political changes that created a new type of commercial film that reflected those revolutionary influences in American life. Even as New Hollywood first took shape, film industry insiders and commentators alike realized its significance. At the time, Pauline Kael compared the New Hollywood to the "tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the 1850s" and David Thomson dubbed the era "the decade when movies mattered." Thomson's words provide the impetus for this volume in which a cohort of seasoned film critics and scholars who came of age watching the movies of this era reflect upon and reconsider this golden age in American filmmaking.Contributors: Molly Haskell, Heather Hendershot, J. Hoberman, George Kouvaros, Phillip Lopate, Robert Pippin, David Sterritt, David Thomson

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• History of the Americas
• History of film
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 15 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781501736117
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 16 Mo

Extrait

WHEN THE MOVIES MATTERED

WHEN THE MOVIES MATTERED

THE NEW HOLLYWOOD REVISITED

EDITED BY JONATHAN KIRSHNER AND JON LEWIS

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2019 by Cornell University

Chapter 1 copyright © Molly Haskell

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2019 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Names: Kirshner, Jonathan, editor. | Lewis, Jon, 1955– editor. Title: When the movies mattered : the New Hollywood revisited /  edited by Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2019. | Includes  bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018052014 (print) | LCCN 2018054550 (ebook) |  ISBN 9781501736117 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501736124 (ret) |  ISBN 9781501736094 | ISBN 9781501736094 (cloth : alk. paper) |  ISBN 9781501736100 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—United States—History—20th century. |  Motion pictures—Social aspects—United States—History—20th century. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.U65 (ebook) | LCC PN1993.5.U65 W47  2019 (print) | DDC 791.430973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052014

Cover image: Sissy Spacek in3 Women(Robert Altman, 1977, Twentieth Century Fox).

CONTENTS

Introduction: The New Hollywood Revisited Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis

1. The Mad Housewives of the NeoWoman’s Film: The Age of Ambivalence Revisited Molly Haskell

2. Antonioni’s America:BlowUp, Zabriskie Point, and the Making of a New Hollywood Jon Lewis

3. “Jason’s No Businessman . . . I Think He’s an Artist”: BBS and the New Hollywood Dream Jonathan Kirshner

4. Robert Altman: Documentaries, Dreamscapes, and Dialogic Cinema David Sterritt

5. City of Losers, Losing City: Pacino, New York, and the New Hollywood Cinema Heather Hendershot

6. The Parallax View: Why Trust Anyone? David Thomson

1

18

36

51

69

86

101

V I C O N T E N TS

7. Cinematic Tone in Polanski’sChinatown: Can “Life” Itself Be “False”? Robert Pippin

8. “I Don’t Know What to Do with My Hands”: John Cassavetes’sThe Killing of a Chinese Bookie George Kouvaros

9. The Spirit of ’76: Travis, Rocky, and Jimmy Carter J. Hoberman

Coda: What “Golden Age”? A Dissenting Opinion Phillip Lopate

Appendix: Time Line—the New Hollywood Years Notes on Contributors Notes Index

115

130

149

164

177 189 191 205

WHEN THE MOVIES MATTERED

INTRODUCTION

THE NEW HOLLYWOOD REVISITED

Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis

A formal announcement of a “New Hollywood” hit newsstands on Decem ber 8, 1967, asTimemagazine, featuring a compelling Robert Rauschenberg Bonnie and Clydecollage on the cover, celebrated the astonishing success of Arthur Penn’s film released in August of that year and predicted a turnaround in the collective fortunes of the American movie studios. The facts of filmmak ing life in the years leading up to the release ofBonnie and Clydewere stark indeed: a 43 percent drop in box office revenues, from $1.7 billion in 1946 to $955 million a decade and a half later, with the average weekly movie atten dance over the same time falling from ninety million to a low of forty million. Complicating the box office slump were a host of problems: a 1948 Supreme Court decision (in the socalledParamount case) that broke up the studios’ monopoly over film development, production, postproduction, distribution, and exhibition; an industrywide anticommunist blacklist that disrupted the industry workforce; the astonishing popularity of television that in the first decades after the war grew from aPopular Electronics curio to a household necessity; urban flight as the white middle class moved out of the cities and into suburbs miles away from the showcase theaters where the studios made most of their money; the emergence of a rockandroll music industry that attracted (and competed with the movie industry for the disposable dollars of) young consumers; an entrenched regime of censorship with strict guide lines penned by a Jesuit priest in 1930 that hamstrung American moviemakers, who faced competition from foreign cineastes working under laxer production codes; and a new and more diverse leisure culture built upon President Eisen hower’s entreaty to “be happy every day . . . [to] play hard, have fun doing it,