Instructor: Walter Metz

American Cinema in the Sixties: The New Hollywood and The Hollywood Renaissance

Periodizing the New Hollywood

1. The "First" New Hollywood (1960-1967): the period when the Hollywood studios are being bought up by multinational conglomerates. For these corporations, the making of movies is not art, but another meaning-less product to make profit off of, like shoes or gasoline. Many of these corporations merely used the film industry as a tax write-off. During this period, Hollywood studios attempted to make bigger and bigger films, to make bigger and bigger profits. Sometimes this worked (The Sound of Music, 1965), but mostly this failed miserably (1968's Oliver!, 1967's Dr. Doolittle), as the studios plunged deeper and deeper into debt.
2. The Hollywood Renaissance (1967-1973): As the social crises of the late 1960s unfolded (the Women’s Movement, the student movement, gay liberation, African-American liberation, the anti-war movement), Hollywood began to make smaller films targeted to niche markets (women, blacks, urbanites, the counterculture). Hollywood soon began to generate a small amount of profit in this way.  The aesthetic practices of these films offer the most experimental period in mainstream Hollywood cinema's entire history.
3. The "Second" New Hollywood (a.k.a., The Blockbuster Era) (1974-present): Hollywood’s attention to the small film was a short-lived as the idealism of the late 1960s, and the success of Jaws in the summer of 1975 sealed a return to the making of large films to make big profits. The fiscal legacy of Jaws is still with us today, as studios jockey the release dates of their summer blockbusters, in the hope of making the mostly elusive big score.

Period #1: The First New Hollywood (Hollywood in the Early Sixties)

As we discussed in the 1950s lecture, 1960 represents the date of transition from the Classical Hollywood period to the New Hollywood period, because of the industrial re-organization at the hands of the Paramount Decree. This vast economic re-organization had a number of effects:

1. Loss of Studio Prestige

CLIP: Strait-Jacket (William Castle, 1964): Ending

2. Deterioration of the Classical Hollywood Narrative

CLIP: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Fritz Lang, 1956): The Car Accident; The "Second" Ending

Where’s Psycho?

Most traditional film histories use Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) as the point of demarcation between Classical Hollywood and the New Hollywood. In many ways, this makes a lot of sense: Psycho is both a classical film (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, one of the major directors of Classical Hollywood), yet its forthright Oedipal-based horror clearly makes it the birth of the modern horror film (the first slasher film, in many ways). However, there are other films that perform the same cultural work as Psycho, made even before. Partly, I would suggest that the traditional periodization of American cinema (1894-1927, 1927-1959, 1960-present) is a bit off. Instead, my work in this course has worked to offer the end of World War II as the major transitional moment. Thus, we could claim that Psycho is another film that is part of a post-war world in a state of extreme crisis. Under this logic, we could see Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps (1955), like Psycho, as offering an Oedipal expression to a post-war crisis in masculinity.

CLIP: While the City Sleeps: "Ask Mother"

Aging Stars as a Sign of the "Death" of Classical Hollywood

It’s worth noting that the "death" of Classical Hollywood was often figured by using aging female Hollywood stars from the Classical period. The most common example of this is Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1961), featuring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. The shift from Classical to New Hollywood as figured by these stars’ appearances in such films is associated with a shift in genre: from woman’s film (where their bodies signified ideal beauty) to horror film (where their aging bodies signify the grotesque).

CLIP: Strait-Jacket: Crawford rips the Crawford mask off of her murderous daughter

Such old-age-as-grotesque motifs did not apply to aging male actors. In plenty of 1960s films, aging male Classical stars were used in genre films equivalent to those of their Classical Hollywood pasts.

CLIP: Hot Rods to Hell: Dana Andrews teaches the punks a lesson

The Flourishing of the Radical Avant-Garde

Fueled by the Beats in poetry, American avant-garde filmmaking came into its own in the early 1960s. Led by a group of filmmakers interested in creating a more personal cinema than Hollywood could ever deliver, a number of gay filmmakers began making films both about gay subjectivity but also about the nature of representation itself.

CLIP: Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1963): James Dean "music video"

These avant-garde films both used excessively modernist techniques, but also referred back to the traditions of classical Hollywood which for so long had stood for all that cinema was. In Scorpio Rising, Anger re-appropriates middle-class, heterosexual imagery (James Dean’s manly body, pop music about heteosexual romance) for a more radical purpose.

Period #2: The Hollywood Renaissance, 1967-1973

The experimentation of the avant-garde filmmakers began even to invade the very practices of Hollywood itself by the late 1960s. Fueled by a new generation of filmmakers (the first of which ever to have gone to film school, who would eventually be dubbed the "Hollywood Brats":  Coppola, Scorsese, etc.), Hollywood cinema began to import the aesthetic practices of the European art cinema, the aesthetic practices of modernism. We have already seen evidence of this in Easy Rider.

The Hollywood Renaissance films were also fueled by the economic changes in Hollywood. The studios began to make films marketed toward niche audiences. The films were budgeted smaller so that a small niche audience for each film could still draw a small profit. This economic perspective on the Renaissance films opens a space for seeing these films not as truly radical, as the modernist argument would imply, but instead as Hollywood operating as usual to draw in an audience without offending anyone. Thus, in retrospect, the Renaissance films end up being much tamer than they are remembered in the cultural unconscious.

For example, Easy Rider was a film marketed to a niche counterculture audience. However, it ends up telling a very traditional story in which the countercultural figures are punished, however ironically.

CLIP: Easy Rider: Ending

The ending is ironic, yes, but nonetheless, the countercultural figures are in fact still violently punished.

Other examples of niche marketing during the Hollywood Renaissance would be films like The Strawberry Statement marketed to the Radical Student Movement and Blaxploitation films, niche marketed to African-American audiences. I will discuss blaxploitation films in more detail in a separate lecture.

The major contribution that the Hollywood Renaissance films make to American cultural history is that they take the Revisionist Genre Film to a new level of revisionism. Unlike the Sirk films of the 1950s, the Renaissance genre films forthrightly and boldly attacked the very core elements of genre filmmaking in Hollywood.

Examples of Genre Revisionism in the Hollywood Renaissance

1. The Western: Hyperviolence linked to the Vietnam War

CLIP: The Wild Bunch: opening

2. Melodrama: The Graduate moves the Oedipal subtext of the melodrama to its outright surface content.

CLIP: The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967): 1st Turning Point

Documentary in the 1960s: Cinema Verite

The American documentary film also went through a Renaissance of sorts during the 1960s. Documentary filmmakers began to rebel against the television documentary aesthetic that had come to dominate the documentary by the late 1950s. The TV documentary aesthetic featured: face the reporter interviews and highly manipulative use of sound and narration.   That is, the TV documentaries of someone like Edward R. Murrow continued in the tradition of the 1930s classical film documentary as we studied in the work of Pare Lorentz. The 1960s documentarists, working in a style known as cinema verite, wanted to let the documentary material tell its own story, without the blatant intervention of the documentarist. Thus, cinema verite’s aesthetic practice involve: no face the reporter interviews, no non-diegetic sound or voice-over narration.

CLIP: High School: Spanish class

High School as Documentary Correlative to The Graduate

CLIP: The Graduate: Ending

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This page was last updated on May 30, 2001

Questions or Comments? Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send e-mail to:  metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman