The Last great American picture show: new Hollywood cinema in the 1970s
2004; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 41; Issue: 11 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5860/choice.41-6423
ISSN1943-5975
AutoresThomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, Noel King,
Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
ResumoSo you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie.1The title of this book suggests a certain cultural pessimism.It talks about a Golden Age and a closed chapter of history: The Last Great American Picture Show.Generally, demarcations of this sort are hard to justify and are more of a hindrance to an open engagement with films.They tend to originate in the romantic notion that cultural history unfolds in discrete episodes ("narratives"), and they often reflect the formative influences of the author.If you have come of age as a cinema-goer during the heyday of New Hollywood cinema -sometime between Bonnie and Clyde and Taxi Driver -you've probably experienced the main brands of post-1970s American cinema by necessity as less rich, less intelligent, less political, as retrograde.My own first experiences of the cinema stand in contrast to this accounteven if, in the end, they led to similar conclusions.I started to go the movies regularly at the end of the Seventies.Star Wars, which I saw six or seven times during 1977/78, propelled this habit.It's a film that fairly exactly marks the point at which public discourse and popular cinema in the United States underwent a crucial shift in emphasis.Towards the end of the Seventies, the increasingly complex narrative negotiation of (both fictional and very real) contradictions and conflicts started to recede behind the phantasms of a neoconservative discourse of re-mythologisation, re-evangelisation and re-militarisation, gradually disappearing from view altogether in the course of the Reaganite era.So in a sense my first cinema was already "post-classical" 2 and post-modern -a cinema of hyper-genres, often accompanied by an ironic affirmation of shop-worn myths and relying more on textures, surfaces, aural-The Impure Cinema: New Hollywood 1967Hollywood -1976 13 13 Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway in Little Big Man but which didn't adversely affect their ability to survive in the more conservative climate that lay ahead.A none too small minority, however, identified more deeply and concretely with the new opportunities of art and life; they exhausted their energies more rapidly (because the opposition was much greater, too) and had difficulty making the transition when all the "fun" was over.If one were to name the typical actors of the New Hollywood era -apart from the obvious (male) names such as Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Robert De Niro, who emerged from this definitive phase in their careers with both bankability and credibility intact for decades to come, two "couples" spring to mind who epitomise two opposing poles of the time.Jane Fonda and Robert Redford: the "official" (and three times on-screen) couple -still popular today, firmly entrenched in the film industry and symbolically linked to the Sixties and Seventies.Karen Black and Warren Oates: an ideal but doubly "unofficial" couple (their liaison being purely based on my imagination; they did not share one moment of screentime) virtually forgotten today with audiences as well as the film industry, but very concretely and painfully associated with the Sixties and Seventies.Fonda and Redford, born in New York and Santa Monica, respectively, rose to prominence on the carefree side of Cold War Culture (which was belatedly memorialised in Barefoot in the Park), came of age during the incipient crisis of the mid-Sixties (The Chase) and, after several detours, continued down a path of social awareness (Downhill Racer, Tell Them Willie Boy's Here, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?) and antiwar protests.Acting as figureheads of the left, they enabled several analyses of social and screen stereotypes (The Candidate, Klute, Tout va bien), but stopped short of any decisive, radical step, mellowing into a kind of critical movie star liberalism (All the President's Men, Three Days of the Condor, Brubaker, Julia, Coming Home, The China Syndrome).They fostered the re-romanticisation of outsider myths (The Electric Horseman) and finally became more occupied with preserving their youth, disciplining the body, consulting on media industry matters and such pursuits as sport, nature, and various entrepreneurial ventures (where the strange intersection between neo-conservatism and political correctness, between Indecent Proposal and Quiz Show, is no longer an issue) -untouchable icons that transcend the film world.Karen Black, born Ziegler in Park Ridge, Illinois, and Warren Oates from Depoy, Kentucky, came from different milieus.For them perfection was not the mother of all things, and they never strove to put well-rounded, triumphant characters on the screen.Instead, they played small, "marginal" types, gentle sufferers, hysterics and unpredictable psychos -never winking at the audience, feeling no need to rise above the intellectual horizon of their charac- 14The Last Great American Picture Show
Referência(s)