Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781501736094
- eISBN:
- 9781501736117
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501736094.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
J. Hoberman
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781501736094
- eISBN:
- 9781501736117
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501736094.003.0010
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
In this chapter the legendary New York film critic J Hoberman revisits the Bicentennial, 1976, a year characterized by a longing for rebirth and a search for new heroes, in Hollywood and in politics. ...
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In this chapter the legendary New York film critic J Hoberman revisits the Bicentennial, 1976, a year characterized by a longing for rebirth and a search for new heroes, in Hollywood and in politics. The nihilistic Taxi Driver, opened in February 1976; it featured the decade’s most compelling anti-hero Travis Bickle, who can be seen as the ultimate expression of the New Hollywood (not least in its critical and popular success). Bickle’s antipode arrived in the person of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, protagonist of an even more successful movie that, retrograde in every way, was the first major expression of a reborn Hollywood—a narrative paralleled in the political realm by Jimmy Carter’s “Cinderella” ascension to the White House.Less
In this chapter the legendary New York film critic J Hoberman revisits the Bicentennial, 1976, a year characterized by a longing for rebirth and a search for new heroes, in Hollywood and in politics. The nihilistic Taxi Driver, opened in February 1976; it featured the decade’s most compelling anti-hero Travis Bickle, who can be seen as the ultimate expression of the New Hollywood (not least in its critical and popular success). Bickle’s antipode arrived in the person of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, protagonist of an even more successful movie that, retrograde in every way, was the first major expression of a reborn Hollywood—a narrative paralleled in the political realm by Jimmy Carter’s “Cinderella” ascension to the White House.
