David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1989.
'Combining aesthetic ans social radicalism,
the formal and technical developments and the innovations inthe social
uses of the medium in this and several other alternative film pracitces
of the period together constitute an epoch in the history of the cinema
where significance is equated only by its resistance to assimilation and
incorporation.' (p.4)
'the drive for authenticity summarizes
so many of the practices discussed here: the urgency with which film was
inserted into the optical physiology or phenomenology of the individual;
the social urgency of the revolutionary intervention in cinema; the semiological
crisis of the image itself leading to a reduction to the essentially filmic.
But all of these were interpenetrated, sometimes overwhelmed, by their
opposites, by the recogntion of difference, by a pleasure in the inauthentic,
or by despair at its inevitability.' (p.28)
Ethan Mordden, Medium Cool: The Movies of the 1960's, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1960.
'In the 1960's however, writers, actors
and directors suddenly retire the traditional character models. They
begin to observe rather than idealize the world. To put it roughly,
for the first fifty years the movies are about romance. Nothing happens
in the 1950s. Then, from 1960 on, the movies are about reality.'
(p.6)
'they break away, force the issue,
rebel-against the Fascism of studioheads, the oppression of the Production
Code, the dreary gleam of the generation of stars chosen to succeed Gable
and Crawford and Davis, the routine of genre. Perhaps the enforced
conformity of the American 1950s, combined with the collapse oft the studio
structures, energized the rebellion.' (p.7)
'Another aspect of sixties cinema to consider
in these first years of America's new wave is how easily realism and honesty
adapted to all forms.' (p.21)
'the revolution of the sixties cinema
was an artistic and personal one, not a political one.' (p.23)
Mordden outlines what he believes the
new 10 commandments of sixties movies are:
1. 'Thou shalt treat
with irreverence that great American taboo, religion.' (p.37)
2. 'Thou shalt question
the fairness of the American political system.' (p.38)
3. 'Thou shalt question
even the values of that most sacred place of all, Hollywood itself.' (p.40)
4. 'Thou shalt despise
even war-making.' (p.41)
5. 'Thou shalt question
the beauty of marriage.' (p.43)
6. 'Thou shalt questioneven
the very nature of romance.' (p.44)
7. 'Thou shalt be sympathetic
to psychotic heroes.' (p.44)
8. 'Thou shalt make
merry comedies about disgusting people.' (p.44)
9. 'Thou shalt deal
most honestly with sex in all its varieties.' (p.46)
10. 'Thou shalt deconstruct heroism.'
(p.55)
Glen Man, Radical Visions: American Film Renaissance 1967-1976, Greenwood Press, Westport, 1994.
'The decades [note that Man refers to 1967-1976, not the 1960's]most significant films wedded the modernist narrative techniques with the classical style, demystified and transformed traditional genres, and foregrounded a consciousness of the cinemtaic process. On a thematic level, they mirrored the attitudes of a time dominated by political radicalism and its consequences- the civil rights movement, the youth movement, the sexual revolution, the women's movement, Vietnam, Watergate and the brutal assassinations of the Kennedy's and Martin Luther King. Common themes inlcude the breakdown of traditional values, sociopolitical oppression, the psychologyu of sex and violence, moral ambiguity, alienation, solipsism, paranoia, and disillusionment.' (p.1)
Brian Neve, Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition, Routledge, London 1995
'The victory of John F. Kennedy in the
presidential election of November 1960 encouraged producers to greater
boldness in seeking support for films dealing with subjects on the liberal
side of the late 1950's anti-communist concerns.' (p.211)
The Vietnam war, which helped to politicise
the baby boom generation of the 1960's, was not directly reflected on the
screen in the decade. Just as in television the tet offensive in
early 1968 had a powerful influence on the frame of reference of television
news, so at the same time the powers-that-be in Hollywood began to recognise
the social, and to some extest political concerns of the youthful counterculture.
Ryan and Kellner see 1967 as the turning point, and the success of low
budget films such as Easy Rider has often been cited as explaining
Hollywood's sudden, and relatively short-lived, shift to the left.' (p.213-214)
'It was through the Western that film-makers
made oblique and metaphoric reference to the Vietnam war.' (p.216).
David Parkinson, History of Film, Thames and Hudson, 1995.
Parkinson claims that three 1959 films,
Alain Resnais' Hiroshima, mon Amour', Francois Truffout's The
400 Blows, and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, 'demonstrate the
emergence of a new audio-visual language that permitted the kind of dramaturgical
impressionism' that had an impact on films of the sixties. (p.185)
Parkinson argues that youth cult films
in the era took advantage of the freedom of the new ratings system but
were radical in terms ofd theme not experimental style. (p.198)
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