American Cinema At A Crossroads The European Dimension Of The Hollywood Renaissance Through A Reading Of Bonnie And Clyde

Diploma Thesis from the year 2004 in the subject Film Science, grade: 3, Liverpool John Moores University, language: English, abstract: The genesis of the Hollywood Renaissance in the late 1960s was the by-product of a synthesis of factors related to social, cultural, institutional, and technological shifts that had been taking place in the United States since the late 1940s. Within this context, the role of European cinema was crucial. It has become a critical commonplace that the films of the Hollywood Renaissance embody a significant aesthetic kinship with the cinematic new waves that had emerged in Europe during the post-war period. This study aims this position further by demonstrating that post-war European new waves at once constituted aesthetic models for Hollywood Renaissance films and shaped key areas of the context that allowed this movement to emerge in the first place. As far as European cinema is concerned, the emphasis here is placed on films of the French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, and New Italian Cinema. Through an extensive use of textual and contextual evidence, this thesis investigates the origins, nature, and extent of the formal impact that post-war European cinema movements had on American filmmaking. It is argued that, inspired by their European counterparts, Hollywood Renaissance filmmakers experimented with all the components of a film: mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, sound, and narrative style – often aiming to create in their pictures the acute sense of realism that European post-war films conveyed. A more frank approach towards traditionally ‘taboo’ subjects was also employed. Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) – the film that, according to critics at large, articulated an aesthetic ‘break’ with the classical tradition and signaled the beginning of the Hollywood Renaissance – is employed as a case study, as it epitomises the European influence in social, cultural, and institutional terms. This study also considers the continuing influence of European cinema on American cinema post Bonnie and Clyde, arguing that in recent years, several American directors have re-discovered the pioneers of post-war European cinema movements and have attempted to recreate the spirit of new wave films in their own pictures.

In December 1967, Time magazine put Bonnie and Clyde on its cover and proudly declared that Hollywood cinema was undergoing a 'renaissance'. For the next few years, a wide range of formally and thematically challenging films were produced at the very centre of the American film industry, often (but by no means always) combining success at the box office with huge critical acclaim, both then and later. This collection brings together acknowledged experts on American cinema to examine thirteen key films from the years 1966 to 1974, starting with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a major studio release which was in effect exempted from Hollywood's Production Code and thus helped to liberate American filmmaking from (self-)censorship. Long-standing taboos to do with sex, violence, race relations, drugs, politics, religion and much else could now be broken, often in conjunction with extensive stylistic experimentation. Whereas most previous scholarship has examined these developments through the prism of auteurism, with its tight focus on film directors and their oeuvres, the contributors to this collection also carefully examine production histories and processes. In doing so they pay particular attention to the economic underpinnings and collaborative nature of filmmaking, the influence of European art cinema as well as of exploitation, experimental and underground films, and the connections between cinema and other media (notably publishing, music and theatre). Several chapters show how the innovations of the Hollywood Renaissance relate to further changes in American cinema from the mid-1970s onwards.

From as scholar of mass communications, an international study of the influence of Hollywood movies on twentieth-century European art films. With McDonalds in Moscow and Disneyland in Paris and Tokyo, American popular culture is spreading around the globe. Regional, national, and ethnic cultures are being powerfully affected by competition from American values and American popular forms. This literate and lively study explores the spread of American culture into international cinema as reflected by the collision and partial merger of two important styles of filmmaking: the Hollywood style of stars, genres, and action, and the European art film style of ambiguity, authorial commentary, and borrowings from other arts. Peter Lev departs from the traditional approach of national cinema histories and discusses some of the blends, overlaps, and hegemonies that are typical of the world film industry of recent years. In Part One, he gives a historical and theoretical overview of what he terms the “Euro-American art film,” which is characterized by prominent use of the English language, a European art film director, cast and crew from at least two countries, and a stylistic mixing of European art film and American entertainment. The second part of Lev’s study examines in detail five examples of the Euro-American art film: Contempt (1963), Blow-Up (1966), The Canterbury Tales (1972), Paris, Texas (1983), and The Last Emperor (1987). These case studies reveal that the European art film has had a strong influence on world cinema and that many Euro-American films are truly cultural blends rather than abject takeovers by Hollywood cinema.

Winner of the 2000 Prix Jean Mitry. A volume of specially-commissioned essays dealing with the attempts to create a pan-European film production movement in the 1920s and 1930s, and the reactions of the American film industry to these plans to rival its hegemony. The book has an impressive array of top scholars from both America and Europe, including Thomas Elsaesser, Kristin Thompson and Ginette Vincendeau, as well as essays by some younger scholars who have recently completed new archival research. It also includes a number of primary documents selected by the contributors to illuminate their arguments and provide a stimulus to further research. This book is a volume in the series Exeter Studies in Film History, and represents a major contribution to cinema scholarship as well as reflecting a strong interest in an area of study currently being developed in university departments and at the British Film Institute. Winner Prix Jean Mitry 2000

In A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft and Business of Cinema, Paul Monaco provides a survey of the narrative feature film from the 1920s to the present. The book focuses on 170 of the most highly regarded and recognized feature films selected by the Hollywood establishment: each Oscar winner for Best Picture, as well as those voted the greatest by members of the American Film Institute. By focusing on a select group of films that represent the epitome of these collaborations, Monaco provides an essential history of one of the modern world's most complex and successful cultural institutions: Hollywood. Divided into three sections, "Classic Hollywood, 1927-1948," "Hollywood In Transition, 1949-1974," and "The New Hollywood, 1975 To The Present," Monaco examines some of the most memorable works in cinematic history, including The General, Wings, Bringing Up Baby, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, On the Waterfront, The Searchers, Psycho, West Side Story, The Godfat

In the late 1960s, the collapse of the classic Hollywood studio system led in part, and for less than a decade, to a production trend heavily influenced by the international art cinema. Reflecting a new self-consciousness in the US about the national film patrimony, this period is known as the Hollywood Renaissance. However, critical study of the period is generally associated with its so-called principal auteurs, slighting a number of established and emerging directors who were responsible for many of the era's most innovative and artistically successful releases.With contributions from leading film scholars, this book provides a revisionist account of this creative resurgence by discussing and memorializing twenty-four directors of note who have not yet been given a proper place in the larger history of the period. Including filmmakers such as Hal Ashby, John Frankenheimer, Mike Nichols, and Joan Micklin Silver, this more expansive approach to the auteurism of the late 1960s and 1970s seems not only appropriate but pressing - a necessary element of the re-evaluation of 'Hollywood' with which cinema studies has been preoccupied under the challenges posed by the emergence and flourishing of new media.

Originally published in 1986, Hollywood Destinies was the first full-length, detailed study of the careers of major European filmmakers, including Ernst Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau, Victor Sjostrom, and Mauritz Stiller, all of whom left their native countries to work in Hollywood during the 1920s. This edition contains recent scholarship on the reception of foreign films and directors in America in the 1920s, analyzes films that were not previously available, and includes a revised and updated bibliography.

A study of how films from the late 1930s to the early 60s portrayed the American ideal.