Phillip Lopate
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781501736094
- eISBN:
- 9781501736117
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501736094.003.0011
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
In this chapter Phillip Lopate offers a dissent from the main themes of The New Hollywood Revisited, suggesting that the movement did not live up to the standards set by the best of the classic ...
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In this chapter Phillip Lopate offers a dissent from the main themes of The New Hollywood Revisited, suggesting that the movement did not live up to the standards set by the best of the classic studio era and foreign art cinemas. The New Hollywood, in Lopate’s estimation, tapped into a zeitgeist dominated by the anti-war movement and the counter-culture that too often surrendered to a didactic, simplistic moralism. He acknowledges that there were wonderful passages in these films, with an energetic, cinematic daring. But the films were as well mired in a willful confusion and irresolution. In this introspective essay, Lopate assesses the styles of Cassavetes, Lumet and Altman, among others, and finds much to praise, despite his enduring wariness of New Hollywood cinema.Less
In this chapter Phillip Lopate offers a dissent from the main themes of The New Hollywood Revisited, suggesting that the movement did not live up to the standards set by the best of the classic studio era and foreign art cinemas. The New Hollywood, in Lopate’s estimation, tapped into a zeitgeist dominated by the anti-war movement and the counter-culture that too often surrendered to a didactic, simplistic moralism. He acknowledges that there were wonderful passages in these films, with an energetic, cinematic daring. But the films were as well mired in a willful confusion and irresolution. In this introspective essay, Lopate assesses the styles of Cassavetes, Lumet and Altman, among others, and finds much to praise, despite his enduring wariness of New Hollywood cinema.
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 ...
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.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.
