New Hollywood Cinema

An Introduction

Geoff King

• Editorial: I.B. Tauris
• Año: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780857731050
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Categoría: Storia e critica del cinema

New Hollywood extends from the radical gestures of the 'Hollywood Renaissance' of the late 1960s and early 1970s to the current dominance of the corporate blockbuster. Geoff King covers new Hollywood dynamically and accessibly in this thoroughly modern introductory text. He discusses diverse films as well as the film-makers and film companies, focusing on the interactions between the film texts, their social contexts and the industry producing them. Using examples across Hollywood and its genres, King reveals how the positions of studios within media conglomerates, together with the impact of television, advertising and franchising on the New Hollywood, shape the form and content of the films.

New Hollywood, Version I

The Hollywood Renaissance

The thirteen years between Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and Heaven’s Gate in 1980 marked the last time it was really exciting to make movies in Hollywood, the last time people could be consistently proud of the pictures they made, the last time the community as a whole encouraged good work, the last time there was an audience that could sustain it.

Peter Biskind¹

Not since the mid 1970s has American cinema promised so much. Taut screenplays, subtle performances and moral ambiguities.

Observer, January 2000²

A giant pair of red lips fills the screen. The face turns away and we see the reflection in a mirror. The distinctive arched features of Faye Dunaway. Half a smile as she peers into the glass before turning away. Cut to a mid-shot in which Dunaway continues to turn and rises. But the match between shots is not quite right. An instant of transition is missing. The cut is abrupt, disarming. Dunaway pouts, naked to the waist but framed above the line of the breasts. She looks around her, moves to lie down on a bed. Cut to the final movement from a lower angle and a different position. Again the shift is not quite what we expect. Jumpy. As if a number of frames have been omitted. Dunaway’s character grabs at a passing insect. Thumps the bedstead in frustration. She pulls herself up, head framed through the horizontal bars. A sultry pose. The camera lurches awkwardly into a big close-up on her eyes and nose. Focus is lost momentarily in the process.

Thus begins Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and with it, arguably, the version of New Hollywood that became known and widely celebrated as the Hollywood ‘Renaissance’. The jump cuts and other disorienting effects are direct borrowings from the films of the French New Wave, but used here to potent and specific effect. The impression created is one of restlessness, edginess and a palpable sense of sexual hunger or longing. These are expressions of the state of the fictionalized character played by Dunaway, the Depression-era bank-robber-to-be Bonnie Parker, but also perhaps of the moment in which the film appeared. Parker is presented, in a few bold stylistic strokes, as a figure as barely contained by her humdrum surroundings as the opening of the film is constrained by the ‘rules’ of classical Hollywood style. She is bursting with desire to escape. So, it seems, were some of the filmmakers coming to the fore in the late 1960s, along with a whole stratum of American culture and society.

The same year saw the release of The Graduate. Dustin Hoffman is Benjamin Braddock, a brilliant student and track star, newly home from college and also imprisoned, if in a more wealthy suburban milieu. His parents buy him a diving suit to celebrate, in which he lurks at the bottom of their swimming pool. Another expressive image of youthful alienation and incipient rebellion. Both films were box office hits, although Bonnie and Clyde was not initially given a very wide release. Two years later, in 1969, two unkempt figures high on drugs and laid back on motorcycles dispelled any doubts about whether these films were part of what was becoming a significant shift within the Hollywood landscape. Easy Rider, made on a budget of $500,000 by a first-time director, was another box-office success, sparking a rush among the studios to cash in as the 1960s youth culture phenomenon finally gained a hold in the Hollywood mainstream. A key development was the fact that Easy Rider was released by Columbia Pictures, one of the major studios, rather than, as originally planned, American International Pictures (AIP). AIP was a low-budget operation that had specialized since the mid-1950s in cheap ‘exploitation’ material such as biker films, horror movies, beach movies and others aimed at the growing teenage audience. Easy Rider marked a point at which this kind of filmmaking crossed over into the Hollywood mainstream. Money flowed more freely, if not in huge amounts, to a new generation of filmmakers who, if they did not exactly ‘take over’ (as the title of one classic account suggests³), made considerable inroads into the culture and business of Hollywood.

The period from the late 1960s until the mid or late 1970s has gained almost mythical status in the annals of Hollywood, its advent marked usually by the appearance and success of Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and Easy Rider, although there were earlier foreshadowings. It is remembered as an era in which Hollywood produced a relatively high number of innovative films that seemed to go beyond the confines of conventional studio fare in terms of their content and style and their existence as products of a purely commercial or corporate system. For some, this period represented the birth (or rebirth) of the Hollywood ‘art’ film, or something very like it. For others, it was a time when Hollywood made a gesture towards the more liberal or radical forces in American society. The period is often taken as a benchmark for measuring the state of Hollywood in subsequent decades. The products of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s are generally found wanting by comparison. Occasional signs of intelligent life in Hollywood today are often referred back to this earlier period, as suggested by the newspaper comment cited at the start of this chapter.

But what exactly happened in the Hollywood of the late 1960s and the 1970s, and why has it gained such resonance? A distinctive group of films did appear in this period, although exactly how far they stray from more familiar Hollywood themes and forms remains subject to debate. This chapter will explore some of the characteristics of these films and the debates surrounding them, and seek to explain why they appeared when they did. In doing so, it will follow closely the pattern suggested in the introduction, examining the Hollywood Renaissance from social, industrial and formal perspectives. The Hollywood Renaissance provides a good illustration of the need to combine such approaches.

It was, quite clearly, to some extent a product of a particular social and historical context: from the fervid brew of 1960s radicalism and counterculture to the icy paranoia of the post-Watergate period. Yet, as will be seen, the ability of this context to become translated into the cinema was conditioned to a large extent by developments in the industrial structure and strategies of Hollywood from the 1950s onwards. The distinctive nature of the Hollywood Renaissance also needs to be considered at the level of film style. This is related in part to the social dimension. To question dominant myths and ideologies entails at least some departure from the formal conventions that play a significant part in their maintenance. The stylistic innovations of the Renaissance also have their own dynamic, however, traceable to sources such as the European ‘art’ film.

From counterculture to Watergate: the social context of the Hollywood Renaissance

The civil rights movement, race riots: ‘black power’. The counterculture, hippies, drug-taking: ‘flower power’. Youth, popular music and fashion. Protests against the war in Vietnam. Student radicalization and the ‘New Left’. A new wave of feminism and demands for gay rights. Political hopes, dreams and nightmares. Kennedy, the Kennedy assassination. Another Kennedy: another assassination. Martin Luther King: assassination. My Lai, Cambodia and the shooting of students at Kent State. Battles on the streets of Chicago. Nixon. Watergate. Humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam. The oil crisis and a reduced scale of global American economic power. Making connections between Hollywood movies and the times in which they appear is not as straightforward a business as it might often appear. Sometimes, however, the case seems more clear-cut; the times are such that they appear to impose themselves forcefully on our consciousness, unmistakably invading the terrain of popular entertainment such as Hollywood cinema. The late 1960s and early 1970s appears to be such a time.

These were years of quite extraordinary upheaval and drama in American society.⁴ Far from everyone in America was directly involved in the events sketched above. Many probably continued to live their lives more or less unchanged. But these events had an undoubted impact on American culture, if only through their pervasive coverage in the media. Single issues such as Vietnam and Watergate were potent enough in themselves. What is most striking about the period, however, is the sheer number of crises and upheavals. Their cumulative impact in a relatively short period of time is what gives grounds for assuming a further-reaching challenge to some American values and assumptions. Images of America as a place of freedom and democracy were dented, if not more seriously damaged.

How, though, were these events reflected in the films of the Hollywood Renaissance? A major ingredient of many of these films is a foregrounding of youthful alienation and/or rebellion. Bonnie and Clyde is, essentially, the story of two handsome, if rather mixed up, people who seek escape from the limitations of small-town life. Their chosen pursuit, bank robbery, appears to be a means to this end, rather than an end in itself. Neither seems to be in it for the money, little of which appears to be accumulated. They do it for the hell of it, for the freedom, celebrity and sheer style offered by a life of crime. Nods are made in the direction of a ‘Robin Hood’ agenda. The point is made that Bonnie and Clyde rob the same banks that are foreclosing against poor farmers. They become popular heroes, but more for the fantasy of escape they enact than for any very specific action. Relevance to the youth rebellions of the 1960s is implicit rather than explicit, the upheavals of the 1930s and the Depression a loose surrogate for those of the later decade.

The Graduate draws more directly on the 1960s culture of youthful alienation. The target is not banks and law-enforcement officers, but the consumer-oriented world of 1960s suburbia. Benjamin appears to have it all: looks (more or less), intelligence, youth, physical prowess and a world of family friends bearing connections and employment opportunities. But exactly what is he offered? ‘Plastics’, recommends Mr Robinson (Murray Hamilton). A career in plastics, the epitome of all that is fake, unnatural and superficial. The world of his parents is presented as a plastic world, as bright, shallow and unreal as the interior of the fish-tank in Benjamin’s bedroom, through the glass of which his figure is sometimes framed to underline his alienation. Benjamin eventually breaks free, swapping a one-dimensional sexual relationship with the middle-aged Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft) for ‘true romance’ with her daughter Elaine (Katherine Ross).

The satirical portrait of conformist suburbia offered by The Graduate is in keeping with broader images of 1960s rebellion, although Benjamin Braddock is hardly a fully-fledged hero of the counterculture. For all his escape from the world of his parents, he remains a rather ‘straight’ individual. His hair is about early Beatles length, a dark bob with a parting: long enough probably to annoy the generation of his parents, but modest by the standards of the late 1960s. He is clean-cut, dressed conservatively in jacket and collar. As such, Benjamin is perhaps not untypical of contemporaries who embraced some of the decade’s more radical criticisms of authority. Many came from similar backgrounds, the cosseted university-educated products of the middle classes who had the time and opportunity to ‘drop out’. Benjamin is too naïve and otherwise preoccupied to be much like the student ‘outside agitator’ suspected by his landlord during the pursuit of Elaine in Berkeley. But he could easily shift in that direction. The social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s were diverse, often overlapping but also filled with contradictions. Leftist radicals in the student or anti-Vietnam movement and black leaders of various kinds had important points in common with the ‘hippie’ movement, for example. They shared some of the same targets. But there were also plenty of divergences. How much would the escaped Benjamin Braddock have in common with the central figures of Easy Rider, the paranoid Billy (Dennis Hopper) and the laid-back Wyatt (Peter Fonda)? Not much, perhaps, but who knows what change another two years of the counterculture might effect?

Easy Rider, in a sense, takes up the story where The Graduate leaves off. It offers a paean to the freedoms of life on the road, 1960s style, fuelled not so much by gasoline as by marijuana, LSD and the anthems of contemporary music. The film has plot and narrative development, but its appeal is close to that of a musical. Its heart is in the regular and frequent ‘numbers’ in which Billy and Wyatt cruise across America, especially the open landscapes of the south-west, to the accompaniment of acts such as Steppenwolf, The Byrds and The Band. The presentation of the numbers is a celebration of the counterculture reduced again, primarily, to a freewheeling spirit of freedom, motion and style. The landscape traversed by Billy and Wyatt is undoubtedly that of the 1960s. The commune in which a group of city kids attempt sincerely, but somewhat desperately, to create a pastoral idyll in semi-desert. The southern small-town café where a group of teenage girls are bursting with attraction to the passing bikers while the adults are all crew-cuts, innuendo and menace; an outpost of the redneck world whose flarings of racial violence were regularly thrust onto television screens across America in the 1960s.

1. The counterculture goes Hollywood: on the road, 1960s-style, in Easy Rider, © Columbia Pictures, 1969. Ronald Grant archive

The core of the film celebrates the counterculture, the primary source of its appeal to the youth audience Hollywood belatedly began to court. There is also a more cynical edge, however. Billy and Wyatt are on a binge of freedom, but their lives are not exactly without clutter. Their gas-tanks are stuffed with dollars, the proceeds of a cocaine deal. Wyatt is most of what we might hope for in an attractive ‘hippie’ character: mellow, easy-going and generous. Billy is very different: edgy and hostile, suggesting perhaps the down-side of overindulgence in recreational drugs.

The texture and appeal of Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde lies to a large extent in their evocations of freedom. Both are clouded, however, by a sense of doom. The protagonist of The Graduate achieves a gradual emancipation. Released from one of the last trappings of his suburban inheritance – the rich kid’s red sports car, which runs out of fuel – he and Elaine escape aboard a bus. Bonnie, Clyde, Billy and Wyatt all end up dead, victims of the forces of repression and reaction. Bonnie and Clyde die, balletically, amid a vigilante hail of bullets. Billy and Wyatt are cut down more unceremoniously, arbitrary targets of a redneck shotgun. If the highway is the avenue to freedom in these films, it is also the place of death, of bleeding bodies left on the verge.

It is not hard to read these violent endings in terms of the shifting dynamics of the later 1960s, even if both films were released before the high season of assassination, 1968, which witnessed the killings of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and the revelation of the massacre at My Lai. The events of the 1960s were filled with currents and eddies, not all of which moved in one direction, but there was a distinct sense of escalating violence, and at times absurdity, in the latter part of the decade. The end of The Graduate is largely the stuff of romantic fantasy, although a certain sense of unease lingers over the final images of Benjamin and Elaine on the bus, overlaid by Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’ (‘hello darkness, my old friend’), the song used to underpin the sense of alienation created in the film’s opening sequence. Those of Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde are examples of an important aspect of the films of the Renaissance: a recognition of dark forces that threaten the more utopian or idealistic aspirations of 1960s social movements. (Another strain of films from the early 1970s marked a violent backlash against the counterculture itself, or that for which it supposed to stand, especially a cycle of right-wing vigilante films such as the Death Wish and Dirty Harry series.)

It is possible, at the risk of some simplification, to divide the social context of the Hollywood Renaissance into two main currents. One, as we have seen, celebrates aspects of 1960s rebellion. The other explores or manifests elements of a darker mood in which alienation leads towards fear and disillusion. If the counterculture, ‘flower power’ and 1967’s proclaimed ‘summer of love’ represent one side of the equation, Vietnam and Watergate are pervasive reference points for the other. The two are not entirely separate, of course, either in the history of the period or in its reflection in Hollywood. Vietnam, especially, was a major catalyst for a host of oppositional currents, a key factor in whatever coherence is found in the various strains of 1960s alienation and radicalism in America. Landmark films such as Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider contain elements of each, appearing almost on the cusp between one mood and the other.

Many films of the Hollywood Renaissance lean more heavily in the direction of cynicism. Exactly how far the influence of the Vietnam war was felt is not easy to determine. Except for the jingoistic drum-beating of The Green Berets (1968), a film that argued a case for American involvement, the war itself was rarely confronted directly until the late 1970s. The closest to a substantial Hollywood treatment was M*A*S*H (1970), an irreverent black comedy the Korean setting of which was clearly a substitute for Vietnam. The presence of the war is felt in the background of numerous other films, including Alice’s Restaurant (1969), a portrait of countercultural lifestyles over which hangs the threat of the draft. Traces of Vietnam and its fallout have been identified in various other films of the period, in genres ranging from the western to horror and those featuring the alienated returning veteran. The traditional assumptions and conventio...