1960 - 1973 The Revolution of Youth Jump to:
1960 - 1973 The Revolution of Youth Jump to:
 |
4 Art Cinema and the New Wave
|
|
As the major Hollywood studios began to lose their domination of the American movie industry and turn their attention to television production, the leadership was taken up by independent producers and directors, making their own films and then distributing them through the networks originally established by the Hollywood companies. In France, a New Wave of filmmakers, many of them former critics, emerged in 1959 when François Truffaut's 400 Blows won the Best Direction prize at the Cannes Film Festival. As critics on the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard had attacked the dominant tradition in French film of respectful adaptations of "quality" novels, and asserted that the true creators of cinema were its directors. As directors, they experimented with subject matter and technique, producing films dealing with more complex and daring themes than the conventional sentimentalities of Hollywood.
This experimentation would not have been possible without an audience prepared to regard cinema as an art form comparable in esthetic merit to the theater. This new audience -young, middle-class, educated and internationally minded- welcomed a cinema that provided the stylistic innovation and thematic substance of literary modernism, for evening entertainment.
Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, Peter Bogdanovich, and Francis Ford Coppola have provided America with a new group of filmmakers, men who have demonstrated a certain independence of subject and method. Part of the void left by the diminishing importance of Hollywood has been filled by foreign filmmakers whose films have been greeted with enthusiasm by American audiences. Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, and Federico Fellini have dominated, but for the first time countries outside of Europe have begun to leave their mark. Japan has been especially productive.
Critics in the press and specialized film journals now championed the director as author, and this individualization of creativity made "cinema" critically respectable, something the bourgeois audience could care about. After 1960, enough people cared about cinema to constitute a market sufficiently large to support a personalized cinema that delighted in idiosyncratic stylistic touches, particularly if they were used to embellish sexual or psychological content.
The development of a general market for the cinematic form of self-conscious modernism established by Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and the French New Wave gave room to further experimentation. In such films as Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime (1968), orthodox chronology was abandoned in favor of stylized meditations on the uncertainties of time.
It also opened up a Western market for East European films for the first time since the 1920s. The Hungarian director Miklos Jancso and the filmmakers of Czechoslovak New Wave formed part of the European art film movement, until the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia brought the "Prague Spring" to an end in 1968.
Perhaps, however, the most important change in movies in recent years has been in the audience. By no means the number of people who went to the movies in the late 1930s still do, but those who do go are younger and more knowledgeable about film. They read the books, subscribe to film journals, watch filmed interviews with movie people on television, and read daily reviews. Many in today's audience are college-educated and have taken film courses while in school; they can talk intelligently about montage, jump cuts, and fade outs. It is for this audience that Scenes from a Marriage is imported from Europe and Star Wars is made.
4 Next Page: Television in the Sixties
4 More Content:
|
||
Chapters: 