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American film movement between the mid-1960s and early 1980s From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The New Hollywood, Hollywood Renaissance, American New Wave, or New American Cinema (not to be confused with the New American Cinema of the 1960s that was part of avant-garde underground cinema), was a movement in American film history from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, when a new generation of filmmakers came to prominence. They influenced the types of film produced, their production and marketing, and the way major studios approached filmmaking.[6] In New Hollywood films, the film director, rather than the studio, took on a key authorial role.
.jpg) Bonnie and Clyde (1967), one of the films that defined New Hollywood | |
| Years active | Mid-1960s to early 1980s |
|---|---|
| Location | United States |
| Influences | |
| Influenced | |
The definition of "New Hollywood" varies, depending on the author, with some defining it as a movement and others as a period. The span of the period is also a subject of debate, as well as its integrity, as some authors, such as Thomas Schatz, argue that the New Hollywood consists of several different movements. The films made in this movement are stylistically characterized in that their narrative often deviated from classical norms. After the demise of the studio system and the rise of television, the commercial success of films was diminished.
Successful films of the early New Hollywood era include Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Rosemary's Baby, Night of the Living Dead, The Wild Bunch, and Easy Rider while films that failed at the box office such as New York, New York, Sorcerer, Heaven's Gate, They All Laughed and One from the Heart marked the end of the era.[7][8]
In fact, The Wild Angels was kind of a... it was a big success for the New Hollywood. It was Roger Corman, it was Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra, it was a New Hollywood kind of movie, and it was very anti-the Old Hollywood, it was very hard-edged, violent, you know, it was not at all an Old Hollywood movie. And I didn't, I wasn't particularly aware of it. Then the following year was Bonnie and Clyde. Shadows had come out in the early '60s, so that was really the first sign of a kind of off-Hollywood movement[9]
– Peter Bogdanovich
Following the Paramount Case (which ended block booking and ownership of theater chains by film studios) and the advent of television (where Rod Serling, John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn, Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet[10][11][12][13][14][15][16] worked in their earlier years), both of which severely weakened the traditional studio system, Hollywood studios initially used spectacle to retain profitability. Technicolor developed a far more widespread use, while widescreen processes and technical improvements, such as CinemaScope, stereo sound, and others, such as 3-D, were invented in order to retain the dwindling audience and compete with television. However, these were generally unsuccessful in increasing profits.[17] By 1957, Life magazine called the 1950s "the horrible decade" for Hollywood.[18]
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Hollywood was dominated by musicals, historical epics, and other films that benefited from the larger screens, wider framing, and improved sound. Hence, as early as 1957, the era was dubbed a "New Hollywood".[18] However, audience shares continued to dwindle, and had reached alarmingly low levels by the mid-1960s. Several costly flops, including Tora! Tora! Tora! and Gene Kelly's directorial effort Hello, Dolly!, and failed attempts to replicate the success of The Sound of Music, put great strain on the studios.[19]
By the time the Baby Boomer generation started to come of age in the 1960s, "Old Hollywood" was rapidly losing money; the studios were unsure how to react to the much-changed audience demographics. The change in the market during the period went from a middle-aged high school-educated audience in the mid-1960s to a younger, more affluent, college-educated demographic: by the mid-1970s, 76% of all movie-goers were under 30, 64% of whom had gone to college.[20] European films, both arthouse and commercial (especially the Commedia all'italiana, the French New Wave, the Spaghetti Western), and Japanese cinema[21] were making a splash in the United States — the huge market of disaffected youth seemed to find relevance and artistic meaning in movies like Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup, with its oblique narrative structure and full-frontal female nudity.[22][23]
The desperation felt by studios during this period of economic downturn, and after the losses from expensive movie flops, led to innovation and risk-taking, allowing greater control by younger directors and producers.[24] Therefore, in an attempt to capture that audience that found a connection to the "art films" of Europe, the studios hired a host of young filmmakers and allowed them to make their films with relatively little studio control. Some of whom, like actor Jack Nicholson and director Peter Bogdanovich, were mentored by "King of the Bs" Roger Corman while others like celebrated cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond worked for lesser-known B movie directors like Ray Dennis Steckler, known for the 1962 Arch Hall Jr. vehicle Wild Guitar[25] and the 1963 horror musical flick The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies.[26] This, together with the breakdown of the Motion Picture Production Code[27] following the Freedman v. Maryland court case in 1965 and the new ratings system in 1968 (reflecting growing market segmentation) set the scene for the New Hollywood.[28]
Other original American independent efforts from this era included the 1953 Oscar-nominated Little Fugitive, John Cassavetes's directorial debut Shadows and Shirley Clarke's Oscar-nominated documentary Skyscraper (each from 1959).[1]
A defining film of the New Hollywood generation was Bonnie and Clyde (1967).[29] Produced by and starring Warren Beatty and directed by Arthur Penn, its combination of graphic violence and humor, as well as its theme of glamorous disaffected youth, was a hit with audiences. The film won Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress (Estelle Parsons)[30] and Best Cinematography.[31][32]
When Jack L. Warner, then-CEO of Warner Bros., first saw a rough cut of Bonnie and Clyde in the summer of 1967, he hated it. Distribution executives at Warner Brothers agreed, giving the film a low-key premiere and limited release. Their strategy appeared justified when Bosley Crowther, middlebrow film critic at The New York Times, gave the movie a scathing review. "It is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy," he wrote, "that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in Thoroughly Modern Millie..." Other notices, including those from Time and Newsweek magazines, were equally dismissive.[33]
Its portrayal of violence and ambiguity in regard to moral values, and its startling ending, divided critics. Following one of the negative reviews, Time magazine received letters from fans of the movie, and according to journalist Peter Biskind, the impact of critic Pauline Kael in her positive review of the film (October 1967, New Yorker) led other reviewers to follow her lead and re-evaluate the film (notably Newsweek and Time).[34] Kael drew attention to the innocence of the characters in the film and the artistic merit of the contrast of that with the violence in the film: "In a sense, it is the absence of sadism — it is the violence without sadism — that throws the audience off balance at Bonnie and Clyde. The brutality that comes out of this innocence is far more shocking than the calculated brutalities of mean killers." Kael also noted the reaction of audiences to the violent climax of the movie, and the potential to empathize with the gang of criminals in terms of their naiveté and innocence reflecting a change in expectations of American cinema.[35]
The cover story in Time magazine in December 1967, celebrated the movie and innovation in American New Wave cinema. This influential article by Stefan Kanfer claimed that Bonnie and Clyde represented a "New Cinema" through its blurred genre lines, and disregard for honored aspects of plot and motivation, and that "In both conception and execution, Bonnie and Clyde is a watershed picture, the kind that signals a new style, a new trend."[23] Biskind states that this review and turnaround by some critics allowed the film to be re-released, thus proving its commercial success and reflecting the move toward the New Hollywood.[36] The impact of this film is important in understanding the rest of the American New Wave, as well as the conditions that were necessary for it.
These initial successes paved the way for the studio to relinquish almost complete control to these innovative young filmmakers. In the mid-1970s, idiosyncratic, startling original films such as Paper Moon, Dog Day Afternoon, Chinatown, and Taxi Driver, among others, enjoyed enormous critical and commercial success. These successes by the members of the New Hollywood led each of them in turn to make more and more extravagant demands, both on the studio and eventually on the audience.
This new generation of Hollywood filmmaker was most importantly, from the point of view of the studios, young, therefore able to reach the youth audience they were losing. This group of young filmmakers—actors, writers and directors—dubbed the "New Hollywood" by the press, briefly changed the business from the producer-driven Hollywood system of the past as Todd Berliner has written about the period's unusual narrative practices.
The 1970s, Berliner says, marks Hollywood's most significant formal transformation since the conversion to sound film and is the defining period separating the storytelling modes of the studio era and contemporary Hollywood. New Hollywood films deviate from classical narrative norms more than Hollywood films from any other era or movement. Their narrative and stylistic devices threaten to derail an otherwise straightforward narration. Berliner argues that five principles govern the narrative strategies characteristic of Hollywood films of the 1970s:
Seventies cinema also dealt with masculine crises featuring flawed male characters and pessimistic subject matters.[38][39][40]
Thomas Schatz points to another difference with the Hollywood Golden Age, which deals with the relationship of characters and plot. He argues that plot in classical Hollywood films (and some of the earlier New Hollywood films like The Godfather) "tended to emerge more organically as a function of the drives, desires, motivations, and goals of the central characters". However, beginning with mid-1970s, he points to a trend that "characters became plot functions".[41]
During the height of the studio system, films were made almost exclusively on set in isolated studios. The content of films was limited by the Motion Picture Production Code, and though golden-age film-makers found loopholes in its rules, the discussion of more taboo content through film was effectively prevented. The shift towards a "new realism" was made possible when the Motion Picture Association of America film rating system was introduced and location shooting was becoming more viable. New York City was a favorite spot for this new set of filmmakers due to its gritty atmosphere.[42]
Because of breakthroughs in film technology (e.g. the Panavision Panaflex camera, introduced in 1972), the New Hollywood filmmakers could shoot 35mm camera film in exteriors with relative ease. Since location shooting was cheaper (no sets need to be built) New Hollywood filmmakers rapidly developed the taste for location shooting, resulting in a more naturalistic approach to filmmaking, especially when compared to the mostly stylized approach of classical Hollywood musicals and spectacles made to compete with television during the 1950s and early 1960s. The documentary films of D.A. Pennebaker, the Maysles Brothers, Robert Drew[1] and Frederick Wiseman, among others, also influenced filmmakers of this era.[43]
However, in editing, New Hollywood filmmakers adhered to realism more liberally than most of their classical Hollywood predecessors, often using editing for artistic purposes rather than for continuity alone, a practice inspired by European art films and classical Hollywood directors such as D. W. Griffith and Alfred Hitchcock. Films with unorthodox editing included Easy Rider's use of jump cuts (influenced by the works of experimental collage filmmaker Bruce Conner[44][45][46]) to foreshadow the climax of the movie, as well as subtler uses, such as those to reflect the feeling of frustration in Bonnie and Clyde, the subjectivity of the protagonist in The Graduate and the passage of time in the famous match cut from 2001: A Space Odyssey.[47][48] Also influential were the works of experimental filmmakers Arthur Lipsett,[49] Stan Brakhage,[3] Bruce Baillie[50] Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger[3] with their combinations of music and imagery and each were cited by George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese as influences.[51][52]
The end of the production code enabled New Hollywood films to feature anti-establishment political themes, the use of rock music, and sexual freedom deemed "counter-cultural" by the studios.[53] The youth movement of the 1960s turned anti-heroes like Bonnie and Clyde and Cool Hand Luke into pop-culture idols, and Life magazine called the characters in Easy Rider "part of the fundamental myth central to the counterculture of the late 1960s."[54] Easy Rider also affected the way studios looked to reach the youth market.[54] The success of Midnight Cowboy, in spite of its "X" rating, was evidence for the interest in controversial themes at the time and also showed the weakness of the rating system and segmentation of the audience.[55]
For Peter Biskind, the new wave was foreshadowed by Bonnie and Clyde and began in earnest with Easy Rider. Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls argues that the New Hollywood movement marked a significant shift towards independently produced and innovative works by a new wave of directors, but that this shift began to reverse itself when the commercial success of Jaws and Star Wars led to the realization by studios of the importance of blockbusters, advertising and control over production (even though the success of The Godfather was said to be the precursor to the blockbuster phenomenon).[56][57]
Writing in 1968, critic Pauline Kael argued that the importance of The Graduate was in its social significance in relation to a new young audience, and the role of mass media, rather than any artistic aspects. Kael argued that college students identifying with The Graduate were not too different from audiences identifying with characters in dramas of the previous decade.[58] She also compared this era of cinema to "tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the 1850s".[59]
Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino identified in his 2022 book Cinema Speculation that:[8]
"regular moviegoers were becoming weary of modern American movies. The darkness, the drug use, the embrace of sensation-the violence, the sex, and the sexual violence. But even more than that, they became wear of the anti-everything cynicism... Was everything a bummer? Was everything a drag? Was every movie about some guy with problems?"
In 1980, film historian/scholar Robert P. Kolker examined New Hollywood film directors in his book A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, and how their films influenced American society of the 1960s and 1970s.[60] Kolker observed that "for all the challenge and adventure, their films speak to a continual impotence in the world, an inability to change and to create change."[61]
John Belton points to the changing demographic to even younger, more conservative audiences in the mid 1970s (50% aged 12–20) and the move to less politically subversive themes in mainstream cinema,[62] as did Thomas Schatz, who saw the mid- to late 1970s as the decline of the art cinema movement as a significant industry force with its peak in 1974–75 with Nashville and Chinatown.[63]
Geoff King sees the period as an interim movement in American cinema where a conjunction of forces led to a measure of freedom in filmmaking,[64] while Todd Berliner says that 70s cinema resists the efficiency and harmony that normally characterize classical Hollywood cinema and tests the limits of Hollywood's classical model.[65]
According to author and film critic Charles Taylor (Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You), he stated that "the 1970s remain the third — and, to date, last — great period in American movies".[66] Author and film critic David Thomson also shared similar sentiment to the point of dubbing the era "the decade when movies mattered".[59]
Author A.D. Jameson (I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing), on the other hand, claimed that Star Wars was New Hollywood's finest achievement that actually embodied the characteristics of the respected "serious, sophisticated adult films".[67][68]
The New Hollywood was not without criticism, as in a Los Angeles Times article film critic Manohla Dargis described it as the "halcyon age" of the decade's filmmaking, that "was less revolution than business as usual, with rebel hype".[69] She also pointed out in her New York Times article that New Hollywood enthusiasts insist this was "when American movies grew up (or at least starred underdressed actresses); when directors did what they wanted (or at least were transformed into brands); when creativity ruled (or at least ran gloriously amok, albeit often on the studio's dime)."[70]
This era of American cinema was also criticized for its excessive decadence and on-set mishaps.[71][72][73] Even Steven Spielberg, who co-directed/co-produced 1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie with John Landis, was so disgusted by the latter's handling of the deadly helicopter accident that resulted in the death of character actor Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, he ended their friendship and publicly called for the end of this era. When approached by the press about the accident, he stated:[74]
"No movie is worth dying for. I think people are standing up much more now, than ever before, to producers and directors who ask too much. If something isn't safe, it's the right and responsibility of every actor or crew member to yell, 'Cut!'
The films of Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola influenced both the Poliziotteschi genre films in Italy[75] and a decade later the Cinéma du look movement in France.[76]
American Eccentric Cinema has been framed as influenced by this era.[77] Both traditions have similar themes and narratives of existentialism and the need for human interaction.[77] The New Hollywood focuses on the darker elements of humanity and society within the context of the American Dream in the mid-1960s to the early 1980s,[77] with themes that were reflective of sociocultural issues and were centered around the potential meaninglessness of pursuing the American Dream as generation upon generation was motivated to possess it.[77] In comparison, American Eccentric Cinema does not have a distinct context, its films show characters who are very individual and their concerns are very distinctive to their own personalities.[77]
The behind-the-scenes of some of the films from this era (Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, Twilight Zone: The Movie and The Omen) were also the subjects for the docuseries Cursed Films.[78][79][80][81]
Todd Phillips's 2019 DC Comics adaptation Joker, alongside the film's period setting, was inspired by the Martin Scorsese classics Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy.[82]
Another film influenced by this era of cinema is Alexander Payne's 2023 feel-good comedy The Holdovers, taking inspiration from the works of Hal Ashby.[83]
The following is a chronological list of notable films that are generally considered to be "New Hollywood" productions.
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