Week 10, March 12 th New Theories, Films: France 1968 & the 1970 ’ s

Week 10, March 12th New Theories, Films: France 1968 & the 1970’s

Reading: Thompson & Bordwell Part 5 The Contemporary Cinema since the 1960’s Chapter 25 “New Cinemas and New Developments; Europe and USSR since the 1970’s “ pp 566-598;.

Supplementary Reading: Corrigan, Timothy, White, Patricia, with Meta Mazaj, Critical Visions in Film Theory; Classical and Contemporary Readings Christian Metz “Loving the Cinema”, “Identification Mirror,” “The Passion for Perceiving” pp17-33

Screening:

One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil, 1968) Jean Luc Godard; Je Tu Il, Elle (1970) Chantal Ackerman; www.egs.edu/faculty/chantal-akerman/biography/

Mon Oncle Antoine (1971) Claude Jutra; The Conversation (1974) Francis Ford Coppola; www.zoetrope.com/ Nashville (1975) Robert Altman. www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink_cinema/

Introduction

In terms of the commercial cinema, the late 1960's and the 1970's witnessed a revolution in marketing, distribution, and financing of movies.

Some changes in film and enormous changes in video technology had some influence on the development of the so-called non commercial alternative film and video industry.

The ‘Love Generation’

Apart from the internationalization of the love generation, the 1970’s witnessed the beginning of the energy crisis, and of the oil producing countries contestation of first world power – the formation of OPEC and the oil cartel agreements. Other factors identifying this decade : a strong mood of national questioning following the defeat of the US in Vietnam (1975) - and the resignation of Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal.

Woodstock (1969)

The Hippie era

The Woodstock Music and Art Festival was a rock festival held at Max Yasgur's 600 acre (2.4 km²) dairy farm in the rural town of Bethel, New York from August 15 to August 18, 1969.

Counterculture of the 1960s and the "hippie era". captured in a successful 1970 movie, Woodstock. Joni Mitchell's song "Woodstock", became a major hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

Twiggy

Contemporary flower power

The energy crisis

Watergate

Environmentalism

The feminist and environmental movements began to gather steam.

The seventies inaugurated the first realization that the worlds population was ballooning and with it a potential food crisis.

March 28, 1979:A nuclear reactor at the Three Mile Island power plant near Harrisburg, Pa., suffers a

partial core meltdown.

The Love canal destroyed the pristine image of corporate and capitalist responsibility.

The Yippies

The Yippies (Youth International Party) had beenreplaced by Yuppies. The seventies is the age of theacronym - OPEC, Swat, Swapo. The sixties and seventies witnessed the further inter nationalization of the movies, assisted by the growth of national film industries, and the questioning of colonial relationships which still continues to this day.

The ‘Me’ Decade

But like all golden ages this golden age ad for some, its down side:”The Me Decade” as well as being the period which ushered in personal therapy, diet control, TV dinners, talk shows game shows, mini skirts, minicars and bell bottom jeans(long live the bell bottom jean), not to mention disco music, religious cults, EST, The steersman handbook.

The Culture of Narcissism

Tom Wolfe The Me Decade

The Culture of Narcissism witnessed the development of the basest appeals to immediate gratification - lowest and most easily commoditized of emotions - one night stand love, Saturday Night Fever 1974 which Motown queen.... told us was but a "second hand emotion" to fear and loathing as key box office prerequisites.

Est = westernized Zen

Erhard Seminars Training, or est (generally in lower-case), a controversial New Age large group awareness training (LGAT) seminar program, became popular during the 1970s. Werner Erhard (born John Paul Rosenberg) founded est and conducted the first est seminar in San Francisco, California, in October 1971. Pressman recounts how Erhard adopted the name "est" from a science fiction book he had read: est: The Steersman Handbook, written by L. Clark Stevens and published in 1970.

Mini cars (and mini skirts)

Diet Control

TV Dinners

Talk Shows (The Late Night show with Johnnie Carson)

TV Advertising

In the early 1970's the studios began to use national network for TV advertising and simultaneous exhibitions of new release films which changed the decades long colonial practice of showing new films in first run theatres followed by the smaller provincial theatres both within the US and abroad.

70’s Golden Age

New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael has suggested that the decade of the 1970s, rather than the 1930's and 1940's was Hollywood's authentic golden age.

Globalization

The Whole Earth catalogue (a by product of sixties sex drugs and rock and roll, flower power protest 60's) this was the period of the blockbuster movie (Godfather), and the disaster movie

Saturday Night Fever

Saturday Night Fever 1974 which Motown queen.... told us was but a “second hand emotion” to fear and loathing as key box office prerequisites.

Je Tu Il, Elle (1974) Chantal Ackerman

Chantal Akerman, b. June 6, 1950

Chantal Akerman, is a Brussels-born and now Paris-based filmmaker, writer, actor, producer and composer, and one of the most important European directors of her generation. As a teenager, she saw Godard's Pierot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be personal and experimental. Akerman started making her own films in the late '60s and gave a new meaning to the term “independent film” as an embodiment of pure independence and creativity.

Akerman has made over 40 works – from 35mm features to video essays to experimental documentaries, including Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles; Saute my ville (Blow up my town); News from Home; Les Rendez-vous d 'Anna; Je, tu, il, elle; Window Shopping; Toute une nuit (All night long); Les Annèes 80 (The Eighties); Nuit et jour (Night and Day); D'Est (From the East); Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des annèes 60 à Bruxelles (Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the1960s in Brussels); Un Divan à New York (A Couch in New York); and most recently, Sud and La Captive.

In 1995 Akerman began experimenting with video installations and exhibiting her work in museums and galleries as well as in art-house theaters. Her video installations, last exhibited at the Venice Art Biennale 2001 and Kassel Documenta 2002, and documentaries display an intensive personal gaze, most notably in Selfportrait / Autobiography: Work in Progress.

The "movie brats"

Francis Ford Coppola (b.1939), from UCLA; George Lucas (b. 1944 University of Southern California) and Martin Scorsese (b 1942 a grad of NYU. Stephen Spielberg b. 1947 self-taught graduated from Cal State University at Long Beach.

Francis Ford Coppola b 1939

The Conversation (1974)

Actors: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Robert Duvall 1974 American thriller about audio surveillance, written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest, and featuring Harrison Ford, Teri Garr and an uncredited appearance from Robert Duvall.

A provoking mystery-suspense drama explores the morality of privacy in the story of Harry Caul, a surveillance expert, who conducts a routine surveillance job only to later find himself suspicious that he has become an unwitting player in murder scheme.

Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966)

Audio imaging

Coppola has cited Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966) as a key influence on his conceptualization of the film's themes, such as surveillance versus participation, and perception versus reality. " (photography in Blowup, audio tapes in The Conversation).

Internationalization

Powerful films were as likely to come from Hungary (Red Psalm Miklos 1972) Poland, Man of Marble by Andre Wajda or Spain The discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise (1972) (Luis Bunuel) which was actually a Spanish, Italian, French production, as from Hollywood.

Star Wars/SDI

Star Wars (1977) a prelude to Star Wars literally as a prologue to the so-called SDI strategic defense initiative, and yes, after The Green Berets (68) the heating up of the Nam film industry The Deerhunter/ Cimino 78 & Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979)

The Vietnam culture industry.

Blockbuster mentality

Religious cults, EST, The Steersman handbook, The Whole Earth catalogue (a by product of sixties sex drugs and rock and roll, flower power protest 60's) this was the period of the blockbuster movie (The Godfather), and the disaster movie (the quintessential Towering Inferno John Guillermann, and Irwin Allen, 1974)