The American New Wave: Research

American New Wave Film Research

• "New American Cinema, also referred to as New Hollywood or post-classical Hollywood, refers to the time from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. In this period, a new generation of young filmmakers came to prominence in American cinema. In the mid-sixties the attendance of U.S theaters was declining. The audience were hungry for something different and raw, and then Bonnie and Clyde came as a shock to the system, and a renaissance was under way. Hollywood had long been an exclusive club, and the only way for a new director to gain entrée was to know somebody on the inside. Hollywood’s old boys network now opened up for new kids, and many of the New American Cinema directors were outsiders. This new generation influenced the types of films produced, their production and marketing, and the way studios approached filmmaking. Their work was thematically complex, formally innovative, and morally ambiguous, and they spoke for a generation disenchanted by the Vietnam War, dissatisfied by the ruling elite, and less willing to conform than their parents. Their films were mostly financed by the major studios, but they introduced subject material and styles that distinguished them from studio tradition that an earlier generation had established ca. 1920s–1950s. They re-worked and re-imagined some of Hollywood’s classic genres, like the crime film, the western, and the war film, and by doing that, they presented a more critical view of America past and present. The director took on a key authorial role in the New American cinema films, and the new approach was to treat the director and the script as “the star”. Together with the directors came a bright generation of actors and actresses who brought a new level of bold intensity and contemporary significance to the screen. The new generation had ambition to overturn the system and create something better in its place, which failed. They did, however, succeed in producing work who is now considered a Golden Age in American cinema."V Dicky (2017) 
• "The `70's saw the emergence of a new American film. Behind this revolution was all the cynicism and mistrust towards authority which pervaded American culture. The 1960's upended all facets of American society; music, literature, politics, sex and race all experienced drastic change during the decade. American cinema adapted and reflected these changes in it’s own time. The studio system of the Golden Era of Hollywood was in it’s twilight. Even though many of the symbols of the old vanguard were still leaving, there was still a reluctance to take risks, or embrace the changing values of society."
• "American cinema in the 70’s had it’s roots in the ashes of Italy after World War II. New Hollywood was a combination of the cynicism of post-modern society with the sweeping romanticism of Pre-Cold War Hollywood. Both past and present became the source of inspiration for driving forward Hollywood’s future."
• "Italian Neo-Realism; It’s 1945 and Europe has been devastated by war. The entire continent is basically one big block of rubble. This environment influenced a bleak, realistic and gritty type of film. These films were categorized by the use of non-professional actors, were filmed on location and often dealt with the difficult and bleak condition of post WWII life in Italy. The most notable example being The Bicycle Thief (1948)." JT Estercamp, New Hollywood, September 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3jnzXX9mXs

• "During World War II, Hollywood produced mostly what could be described as benign propaganda films (“Air Force,” “Destination Tokyo,” "Back to Bataan," “They Were Expendable”) depicting soldiers as heroes, the war as just, the enemy as evil, and America’s involvement in the conflict as necessaryThere were also films produced during the war and after that showed war was hell (“G.I. Joe,” “Twelve O’clock High”) and that soldiers could come back changed (“The Best Years of Our Lives”) but there was a general sense of patriotism and there wasn’t any pervasive sense of criticism about the U.S. having gotten involved in the conflict. The same could be said about the majority of Hollywood films produced during the Korean War and depicting that conflicBut films about the Vietnam War were different for two reasons.First, the war itself divided the U.S., and there was a strong and vocal anti-war movement at home and abroad. After the war ended, the U.S. had the added difficulty of not being able to claim a winSecond, the Hollywood studio system — which represented the establishment in the entertainment world just as the U.S. government was in the political sphere — was breaking down as the war began and by the 1970s, there was a vibrant independent film scene where filmmakers felt freer to speak their minds and to go against the establishment of both the studios and the government." Accomando. B, The Vietnam War on Film, April 2015"After a three-decade free fall that spanned the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, Americans multiplied their homicide rate by more than two and a half, from a low of 4.0 in 1957 to a high of 10.2 in 1980 (U.S. Bureau of Statistics; Fox and Zawitz: 2007). The upsurge included every other category of major crime as well, including rape, assault, robbery, and theft, and lasted (with ups and downs) for three decades. The cities got particularly dangerous, especially New York, which became a symbol of the new criminality. Though the surge in violence affected all the races and both genders, it was most dramatic among black men, whose annual homicide rate had shot up by the mid-1980s to 72 per 100,000.The flood of violence from the 1960s through the 1980s reshaped American culture, the political scene, and everyday life. Mugger jokes became a staple of comedians, with mentions of Central Park getting an instant laugh as a well-known death trap. New Yorkers imprisoned themselves in their apartments with batteries of latches and deadbolts, including the popular “police lock,” a steel bar with one end anchored in the floor and the other propped up against the door. The section of downtown Boston not far from where I now live was called the Combat Zone because of its endemic muggings and stabbings. Urbanites quit other American cities in droves, leaving burned-out cores surrounded by rings of suburbs, exurbs, and gated communities. Books, movies and television series used intractable urban violence as their backdrop, including Little Murders, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, Escape from New York, Fort Apache the Bronx, Hill Street Blues, and Bonfire of the Vanities. Women enrolled in self-defense courses to learn how to walk with a defiant gait, to use their keys, pencils, and spike heels as weapons, and to execute karate chops or jujitsu throws to overpower an attacker, role-played by a volunteer in a Michelin-man-tire suit. Red-bereted Guardian Angels patrolled the parks and the mass transit system, and in 1984 Bernhard Goetz, a mild-mannered engineer, became a folk hero for shooting four young muggers in a New York subway car. A fear of crime helped elect decades of conservative politicians, including Richard Nixon in 1968 with his “Law and Order” platform (overshadowing the Vietnam War as a campaign issue); George H. W. Bush in 1988 with his insinuation that Michael Dukakis, as governor of Massachusetts, had approved a prison furlough program that had released a rapist; and many senators and congressmen who promised to “get tough on crime.” Though the popular reaction was overblown—far more people are killed every year in car accidents than in homicides, especially among those who don’t get into arguments with young men in bars—the sense that violent crime had multiplied was not a figment of their imaginations.The rebounding of violence in the 1960s defied every expectation. The decade was a time of unprecedented economic growth, nearly full employment, levels of economic equality for which people today are nostalgic, historic racial progress, and the blossoming of government social programs, not to mention medical advances that made victims more likely to survive being shot or knifed. Social theorists in 1962 would have happily bet that these fortunate conditions would lead to a continuing era of low crime. And they would have lost their shirts.Why did the Western world embark on a three-decade binge of crime from which it has never fully recovered? This is one of several local reversals of the long-term decline of violence that I will examine in this book. If the analysis is on the right track, then the historical changes I have been invoking to explain the decline should have gone into reverse at the time of the surges.An obvious place to look is demographics. The 1940s and 1950s, when crime rates hugged the floor, were the great age of marriage. Americans got married in numbers not seen before or since, which removed men from the streets and planted them in suburbs (Courtwright 1996). One consequence was a bust in violence. But the other was a boom in babies. The first baby boomers, born in 1946, entered their crime-prone years in 1961; the ones born in the peak year, 1954, entered in 1969. A natural conclusion is that the crime boom was an echo of the baby boom. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t add up. If it were just a matter of there being more teenagers and twenty-somethings who were committing crimes at their usual rates, the increase in crime from 1960 to 1970 would have been 13 percent, not 135 percent.[2] Young men weren’t simply more numerous than their predecessors; they were more violent, too.Many criminologists have concluded that the 1960s crime surge cannot be explained by the usual socioeconomic variables but was caused in large part by a change in cultural norms. Of course, to escape the logical circle in which people are said to be violent because they live in a violent culture, it’s necessary to identify an exogenous cause for the cultural change. The political scientist James Q. Wilson has argued that demographics were an important trigger after all, not because of the absolute numbers of young people but because of their relative numbers. He makes the point by commenting on a quotation from the demographer Norman Ryder:There is a perennial invasion of barbarians who must somehow be civilized and turned into contributors to fulfillment of the various functions requisite to societal survival.” That ‘invasion’ is the coming of age of a new generation of young people. Every society copes with this enormous socialization process more or less successfully, but occasionally that process is literally swamped by a quantitative discontinuity in the number of persons involved . . . In 1950 and still in 1960 the ‘invading army’ (those aged fourteen to twenty-four) were outnumbered three to one by the size of the ‘defending army’ (those aged twenty-five to sixty-four). By 1970 the ranks of the former had grown so fast that they were only outnumbered two to one by the latter, a state of affairs that had not existed since 1910.[3]Subsequent analyses showed that this explanation is not, by itself, satisfactory. Age cohorts that are larger than their predecessors do not, in general, commit more crimes.[4] But I think Wilson was on to something when he linked the 1960s crime boom to a kind of intergenerational de-civilizing process. In many ways the new generation tried to push back against the eight-century movement described by Norbert Elias.The baby boomers were unusual (I know, we baby boomers are always saying we’re unusual) in sharing an emboldening sense of solidarity, as if their generation were an ethnic group or a nation. (A decade later it was pretentiously referred to as “Woodstock Nation.”) Not only did they outnumber the older generation, but thanks to new electronic media, they felt the strength of their numbers. The baby boomers were the first generation to grow up with television. And television, especially in the three-network era, allowed them to know that other baby boomers were sharing their experiences, and to know that the others knew that they knew. This common knowledge, as economists and logicians call it, gave rise to a horizontal web of solidarity that cut across the vertical ties to parents and authorities that had formerly isolated young people from one another and forced them to kowtow to their elders Pinker, 2007b: chapter 8; Chwe 2001). Much like a disaffected population that feels its strength only when it assembles at a rally, baby boomers saw other young people like themselves in the audience of The Ed Sullivan Show grooving on the Rolling Stones and knew that every other young person in America was grooving at the same time, and knew that the others knew that they knew.The baby boomers were bonded by another new technology of solidarity, first marketed by an obscure Japanese company called Sony: the transistor radio. The parents of today who complain about the iPods and cell phones that are soldered onto the ears of teenagers forget that their own parents made the same complaint about them and their transistor radios. I can still remember the thrill of tuning in to signals from New York radio stations bouncing off the late-night ionosphere into my bedroom in Montreal, listening to Motown and Dylan and the British invasion and psychedelia and feeling that something was happening here, but Mr. Jones didn’t know what it was.A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times. But this decivilizing process was magnified by a trend that had been gathering momentum throughout the 20th century. The sociologist Cas Wouters, a translator and intellectual heir of Elias, has argued that after the European Civilizing Process had run its course, it was superseded by an informalizing process. The Civilizing Process had been a flow of norms and manners from the upper classes downward. But as Western countries became more democratic, the upper classes became increasingly discredited as moral paragons, and hierarchies of taste and manners were leveled. The informalization affected the way people dressed, as they abandoned hats, gloves, ties, and dresses for casual sportswear. It affected the language, as people started to address their friends with first names instead of Mr. and Mrs. and Miss. And it could be seen in countless other ways in which speech and demeanor became less mannered and more spontaneous.[5]The stuffy high-society lady, like the Margaret Dumont character in the Marx Brothers movies, became a target of ridicule rather than emulation.After having been steadily beaten down by the informalizing process, the elites then suffered a second hit to their legitimacy. The civil rights movement had exposed a moral blot on the American establishment, and as critics shone a light on other parts of society, more stains came into view. Among them were the threat of a nuclear holocaust, the pervasiveness of poverty, the mistreatment of Native Americans, the many illiberal military interventions, particularly the Vietnam War, and later the despoliation of the environment and the oppression of women and homosexuals. The stated enemy of the Western establishment, Marxism, gained prestige as it made inroads in third-world ‘liberation’ movements, and it was increasingly embraced by bohemians and fashionable intellectuals. Surveys of popular opinion from the 1960s through the 1990s showed a plummeting of trust in every social institution (Fukuyama 1999).The leveling of hierarchies and the harsh scrutiny of the power structure were unstoppable and in many ways desirable. But one of the side effects was to undermine the prestige of aristocratic and bourgeois lifestyles that had, over the course of several centuries, become less violent than those of the working class and underclass. Instead of values trickling down from the court, they bubbled up from the street, a process that was later called ‘proletarianization’ and ‘defining deviancy down.’[6]These currents pushed against the civilizing tide in ways that were celebrated in the era’s popular culture. The backsliding, to be sure, did not originate in the two prime movers of Elias’s Civilizing Process. Government control did not retreat into anarchy, as it had in the American West and in newly independent third-world countries, nor did an economy based on commerce and specialization give way to feudalism and barter. But the next step in Elias’s sequence – the psychological change toward greater self-control and interdependence – came under steady assault in the counterculture of the generation that came of age in the 1960s.A prime target was the inner governor of civilized behavior, self-control. Spontaneity, self-expression, and a defiance of inhibitions became cardinal virtues. ‘If it feels good, do it,’ commanded a popular lapel button. Do It was the title of a book by the political agitator Jerry Rubin. ‘Do It ’Til You’re Satisfied (Whatever it Is)’ was the refrain of a popular song by BT Express. The body was elevated over the mind: Keith Richards boasted, ‘Rock and roll is music from the neck downwards.’ And adolescence was elevated over adulthood: ‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty,’ advised the agitator Abbie Hoffman; ‘Hope I die before I get old,’ sang The Who in ‘My Generation.’ Sanity was denigrated, and psychosis romanticized, in movies such as A Fine Madness, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, King of Hearts, and Outrageous. And then of course there were the drugs.Another target of the counterculture was the ideal that individuals should be embedded in webs of dependency that obligate them to other people in stable economies and organizations. If you wanted an image that contradicted this ideal as starkly as possible, it might be a rolling stone. Originally from a song by Muddy Waters, the image resonated with the times so well that it lent itself to three icons of the culture: the rock group, the magazine, and the famous song by Bob Dylan (in which he taunts an upper-class woman who has become homeless). ‘Tune in, turn on, drop out,’ the motto of onetime Harvard psychology instructor Timothy Leary, became a watchword of the psychdelia movement. The idea of coordinating one’s interests with others in a job was treated as selling out. As Dylan put it:
• Well, I try my bestTo be just like I am,But everybody wants youTo be just like them.They say sing while you slave and I just get bored.I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.Elias had written that the demands of self-control and the embedding of the self into webs of interdependence were historically reflected in the development of timekeeping devices and a consciousness of time: ‘This is why tendencies in the individual so often rebel against social time as represented by his or her super-ego, and why so many people come into conflict with themselves when they wish to be punctual’ (Elias 1939/2000: 380). In the opening scene of the 1969 movie Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda conspicuously toss their wristwatches into the dirt before setting off on their motorcycles to find America. In a similar vein, the first album by the band Chicago (when they were known as the Chicago Transit Authority) contains the lyrics ‘Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? If so I can’t imagine why.’ All this made sense to me when I was sixteen, and so I discarded my own Timex. When my grandmother saw my naked wrist, she was incredulous: ‘How can you be a mensch without a zager?’ She ran to a drawer and pulled out a Seiko she had bought during a visit to the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka. I have it to this day.Together with self-control and societal connectedness, a third ideal came under attack: marriage and family life, which had done so much to domesticate male violence in the preceding decades. The idea that a man and a woman should devote their energies to a monogamous relationship in which they raise their children in a safe environment became a target of howling ridicule. That life was now the soulless, conformist, consumerist, materialist, ticky-tacky, plastic, white-bread, Ozzie and Harriet suburban wasteland.I don’t remember anyone in the 1960s blowing his nose into a tablecloth, but popular culture did celebrate the flouting of standards of cleanliness, propriety, and sexual continence. The hippies were popularly perceived as unwashed and malodorous, which in my experience was a calumny. But there’s no disputing that they rejected conventional standards of grooming, and an enduring image from Woodstock was of naked concert-goers frolicking in the mud. One could trace the reversal of conventions of propriety on album covers alone. There was The Who Sell Out, with a sauce-dribbling Roger Daltrey immersed in a bath of baked beans; the Beatles’ Yesterday and Today, with the lovable moptops adorned with chunks of raw meat and decapitated dolls (quickly recalled); the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet, with a photo of a filthy public toilet (originally censored); and Who’s Next, in which the four musicians are shown zipping up their flies while walking away from a urine-spattered wall. The flouting of propriety extended to famous live performances, as when Jimi Hendrix pretended to copulate with his amplifier at the Monterey Pop Festival.

Bibliograhy:

•  Accomando.B, The Vietnam War on Film, April 2015, published by KPBS, available from:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3jnzXX9mXs
•  Estercamp.JT, New Hollywood; Why the 70s were the greatest decade in American Cinema, published by meduim, available from: https://medium.com/@jtesterkamp/new-hollywood-why-the-70s-were-the-greatest-decade-in-america-cinema-c42676e2170f
•  Dicky.V, New American Cinema, November 2017, published by Cinema Oceania, available from: https://cinemaoceania.wordpress.com/2015/11/17/new-american-cinema/
• Pinker.S, Decivilisation in the 1960s, from The Better Angles Of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, 2011, viking penguin, available from: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0002.206/--decivilization-in-the-1960s?rgn=main;view=fulltext