Through the Looking Glass: The American Art Cinema in an Age of Social Change
2010; Pittsburg State University; Volume: 52; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0026-3451
Autores Tópico(s)Art History and Market Analysis
ResumoBy 1970, it's worth reminding ourselves at the outset, film's recognition as an form had not been in question for some time. Yet film, as it was mostly being made above ground in the United States at that moment, had very little aesthetic identity in the minds of its chief practitioners and enthusiasts, or at any rate its most vocal ones. There are more ironies than one here: unquestionably better, more mature, more salient and thematically sophisticated as many of America's new films had become, superior as a class as they were to the great bulk of American movies for a generation, they caused an excitement, an intensity and vigor of response, much beyond what was then accorded the current theater or new fiction. But this had almost nothing to do with any perennial or universal conceptions of art and almost everything to do with political, sociological, and psychological phenomena that are either indifferent or actively hostile to such conceptions. Let's call the New American Cinema of this period, the late sixties and early seventies, the cinema of make-believe meaning. Changes in the United States connected with sex, race, gender, and class (women's liberation, gay liberation, birth control, abortion fights, minority fights, opposition to the Vietnam War, the lifting of censorship restrictions)--that is, with anti-authoritarianism directed at the patriarchal Establishment had, inevitably, changed the tone of its film industry. A liberal, college-bred generation of producers and directors (and screenwriters and publicists) had come into being--men quite different in self-estimate and hunger for status from the first few generations of American film practitioners. This latest filmmaking generation that had come to power (to power--quite unlike small independent or underground filmmakers) operated comfortably within a cosmos of intense commercial pressure to which these men had nicely adjusted their ambitions for intellectual prestige. But this reconciliation prevented them from making the sheer entertainments, comic or serious, of the palmy Hollywood days--the sincere days, as Jean-Luc Godard once described them with peculiar accuracy; and, of course, such a compromise also prevented fidelity to and intellect. What we got were entertainment films on which meaning was either grossly impasted or clung to only as long as convenient. Robert Mulligan's film of Up the Down Staircase (1967), for example, took several of the harshest problems of urban education and faced them with new, contemporary honesty--until it turned its back on them. From a reverse angle, the Western became adult in the form of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), and the crime film became Freudo-Marxist in Arthur Penn's Mickey One(1965), so that we could go to Westerns and crime films without skulking embarrassedly in and out of the theater. Even the glossy marital comedy (Stanley Donen's Two for the Road [1967]) pilfered just enough from the new French film so that we could know we were keeping up as well as enjoying ourselves. (It even got praised for this pilfering as proof that the commercial film was maturing.) Moreover, however visually acute these American directors had become, even visually they betrayed themselves by trying to give weight to flimsy material with otherwise superb cinematography (such as Haskell Wexler's for a gimmicky race-relations thriller, In the Heat of the Night [1967], directed by Norman Jewison). They used close-ups that were meant to seem unconventionally truthful but that dared nothing and said nothing (like a dead dog's paw or a singing convict's mouth in Stuart Rosenberg's Cool Hand Luke [1967]). And these directors strained to include entire sequences that were only inserted arias for the cameraman, as was the Parker family reunion in Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Or, again as in the case of Bonnie and Clyde, they struggled to contrive an overall moral statement in the visual aesthetics of their own filming. …
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