In the 1960s a new generation of film directors rebelled against the conservatism of Classical Hollywood. Challenging the views, values, and sexual mores of mainstream Hollywood (the “establishment”), the younger, postwar generation of filmmakers glamorized counterculture lifestyles and celebrated youth and activism as well as controversial subjects such as sex, violence, and drugs. In this course, we will first explore the first wave of anti-establishment and anti-commercialist films such as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) before we focus on so-called Blaxploitation films in which black outlaws resist white authority (e.g., Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, 1971, and Gordon Parks’ Shaft, 1971). Our journey through the cultural history of American movies from the 1960s to the present will also pay attention to several “revolutionary” periods: e.g., erotic cinema, pop culture and personal film (e.g., Andy Warhol’s Empire, 1964), the New Wave of filmmakers (and “the auteur theory”), anti-Vietnam movies (vs. patriotic war movies), the rise of independent films, and postmodernist films that radically subvert conventional narrative patterns (e.g., David Fincher’s Fight Club, 1999, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, 2000, and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, 2012). We will discuss the aesthetics of specific films (e.g., strategies of narration and cinematic construction) and situate them within a larger industrial, economic, social, political, historical, and cultural context.
Required Texts:
- Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America (Vintage)
- Additional texts will be put online (Stud.IP)
