When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited
Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis
Abstract
The “New Hollywood” that emerged in the late sixties is now widely recognized as an era of remarkable filmmaking, when directors enjoyed a unique autonomy to craft ambitious, introspective movies that evinced a cinematic world of hard choices, complex interpersonal relationships, compromised heroes, and uncertain outcomes. The New Hollywood Revisited brings together a remarkable collection of authors (some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood as it unfolded), to revisit this unique era in American cinema (circa 1967-1976). It was a decade in which a number of extraordinary factors – including ... More
The “New Hollywood” that emerged in the late sixties is now widely recognized as an era of remarkable filmmaking, when directors enjoyed a unique autonomy to craft ambitious, introspective movies that evinced a cinematic world of hard choices, complex interpersonal relationships, compromised heroes, and uncertain outcomes. The New Hollywood Revisited brings together a remarkable collection of authors (some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood as it unfolded), to revisit this unique era in American cinema (circa 1967-1976). It was a decade in which a number of extraordinary factors – including the end of a half-century-old censorship regime and economic and demographic changes to the American film audience – converged and created a new type of commercial film, imprinted with the social and political context of the times: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, economic distress, urban decay, and, looming, the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon presidency. This volume offers the opportunity to look back, with nearly fifty years hindsight, at a golden age in American filmmaking.
Keywords:
New Hollywood,
Auteur Renaissance,
Movie Brats,
70s Film,
Molly Haskell,
David Thomson,
J Hoberman,
Phillip Lopate
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501736094 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: January 2020 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501736094.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Jonathan Kirshner, editor
Boston College
Jon Lewis, editor
Oregon State University
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