I just found the documentary "The American Nightmare" for a student writing about horror films -- highly recommended look at the epic changes in the genre in the early 70s.
Showing posts with label 1970s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1970s. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Monday, October 7, 2013
Friday, April 13, 2012
Eric Hynes: Wishing on a Starship
Wishing on a Starship
Eric Hynes on Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Reverse Shot
For a filmmaker best known for grand gestures—bringing dinosaurs back to life, orchestrating a bicycle ride across the moon, exhuming Kubrick, monumentalizing D-Day, the Holocaust, and the slave trade, even making the hair on Robin Williams’s back disappear—Steven Spielberg might be at his best when illuminating errant details. A dedicated symbolist, he can’t help but bestow import on whatever he captures (the more obvious his object, the more blunt the effect, whether it’s an American flag, a dark face, or a red coat in a black-and-white world.) His cinema telescopes and microscopes, making big what’s small, and near what’s far, and always making you feel—both physically and emotionally—the ingenious contraption at work. Rarely has his marriage of form and feeling worked as fluidly and guilelessly as it did in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film of colossal ambition that plays as intimate, of heart-thumping sensations that register as cosmic, of wondrous spectacle that in the end just sings.
Coming just two year’s after the director’s own Jaws jump-started the blockbuster era, and a mere six months after Star Wars raised the bar, Close Encounters still exceeded all expectations, raking in over $300 million and furthering the culture’s science-fiction craze. Yet even with its big budget and masscult appeal, it still managed to feel like a film of the American maverick era, with one foot in the future, and the other in the dusty, post-hippie, faux-wood-on-a-station-wagon present. While Lucas blasted us into a galaxy far, far away, Spielberg brought the galaxy home, shining its brilliance right through the kitchen door. A large thanks for this belongs to cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Deliverance), who won an Oscar for visualizing a world in which spaceships and bellbottoms share the frame. He films a cluttered suburban living room with the same sensuousness as the Gobi Desert, a little boy with the same majesty as he does unlikely costar François Truffaut. The blockbuster era was at hand, but so was a global recession, so were fresh memories of the Vietnam War and Watergate. Forget the special effects: Spielberg’s most impressive trick was producing a seventies-set drama so devoid of cynicism.
It’s the small things you notice first. A blip on the radar screen; a toy robot buzzing to life; lights in the rearview; Johnny Mathis spookily summoned on the turntable; a little boy’s frown turned upside down by an off-screen marvel. These initial signs of alien life are negligible phenomenon, but they register as profound. And since they take place in private spaces—in the home, in the car—they also feel personal. When Richard Dreyfuss’s Roy Neary acquires an asymmetrically sunburned face from his first unidentified encounter, it’s more than proof of alien life—he’s been tangibly altered. Vital to the construction of the larger story, the sunburn detail is even more crucial to the development of the personal one. Whereas his wife wants to cover up or explain the burn away, Roy wears it like a badge. After all, the phenomenon happened to him.
Roy struggles to make sense of what he’s seen, and with the fact that he has no control over how he’s changed. He’s lost his job, alienated his wife, and spooked his kids, yet he can’t bring himself to care about any of it—not since the universe slipped in through the car window. While the film’s protracted middle section is its most forgettable, here Spielberg’s at least striving to ground his fantasy in everyday life (something he’d nail in E.T. ). Essential as these scenes are, Dreyfuss and Teri Garr chew more scenery than they should (watching a Cassavetian domestic meltdown in the middle of a science fiction flick isn’t as fun as it sounds), and a lot of screen time is burned without a whole lot of character development (we get it: he’s obsessed, and she’s had it up to here). Spielberg also gets a little too cute with the Devil’s Tower compulsion, belaboring Roy’s unconscious noodling, drawing, sculpting and construction of flat top mountains before he finally notices that his inspiration is right there on the TV! Then it’s a cross-country scamper to Wyoming with fellow traveler Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon, who’s marvelous but underexploited emotionally, especially since she plays the mom of a toddler who’s been abducted by aliens), a sit-down with fellow wide-eyed obsessive, the French scientist Claude Lacombe (Truffaut), and finally the mounting of the Tower. But the Tower is merely a location, not the destination. Not exactly a red herring, the land mass is more like a knowable entity in the midst of the unknowable, a tangible goal as the unfathomable waits right around the corner.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Eric Hynes on Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Reverse Shot
For a filmmaker best known for grand gestures—bringing dinosaurs back to life, orchestrating a bicycle ride across the moon, exhuming Kubrick, monumentalizing D-Day, the Holocaust, and the slave trade, even making the hair on Robin Williams’s back disappear—Steven Spielberg might be at his best when illuminating errant details. A dedicated symbolist, he can’t help but bestow import on whatever he captures (the more obvious his object, the more blunt the effect, whether it’s an American flag, a dark face, or a red coat in a black-and-white world.) His cinema telescopes and microscopes, making big what’s small, and near what’s far, and always making you feel—both physically and emotionally—the ingenious contraption at work. Rarely has his marriage of form and feeling worked as fluidly and guilelessly as it did in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film of colossal ambition that plays as intimate, of heart-thumping sensations that register as cosmic, of wondrous spectacle that in the end just sings.
Coming just two year’s after the director’s own Jaws jump-started the blockbuster era, and a mere six months after Star Wars raised the bar, Close Encounters still exceeded all expectations, raking in over $300 million and furthering the culture’s science-fiction craze. Yet even with its big budget and masscult appeal, it still managed to feel like a film of the American maverick era, with one foot in the future, and the other in the dusty, post-hippie, faux-wood-on-a-station-wagon present. While Lucas blasted us into a galaxy far, far away, Spielberg brought the galaxy home, shining its brilliance right through the kitchen door. A large thanks for this belongs to cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Deliverance), who won an Oscar for visualizing a world in which spaceships and bellbottoms share the frame. He films a cluttered suburban living room with the same sensuousness as the Gobi Desert, a little boy with the same majesty as he does unlikely costar François Truffaut. The blockbuster era was at hand, but so was a global recession, so were fresh memories of the Vietnam War and Watergate. Forget the special effects: Spielberg’s most impressive trick was producing a seventies-set drama so devoid of cynicism.
It’s the small things you notice first. A blip on the radar screen; a toy robot buzzing to life; lights in the rearview; Johnny Mathis spookily summoned on the turntable; a little boy’s frown turned upside down by an off-screen marvel. These initial signs of alien life are negligible phenomenon, but they register as profound. And since they take place in private spaces—in the home, in the car—they also feel personal. When Richard Dreyfuss’s Roy Neary acquires an asymmetrically sunburned face from his first unidentified encounter, it’s more than proof of alien life—he’s been tangibly altered. Vital to the construction of the larger story, the sunburn detail is even more crucial to the development of the personal one. Whereas his wife wants to cover up or explain the burn away, Roy wears it like a badge. After all, the phenomenon happened to him.
Roy struggles to make sense of what he’s seen, and with the fact that he has no control over how he’s changed. He’s lost his job, alienated his wife, and spooked his kids, yet he can’t bring himself to care about any of it—not since the universe slipped in through the car window. While the film’s protracted middle section is its most forgettable, here Spielberg’s at least striving to ground his fantasy in everyday life (something he’d nail in E.T. ). Essential as these scenes are, Dreyfuss and Teri Garr chew more scenery than they should (watching a Cassavetian domestic meltdown in the middle of a science fiction flick isn’t as fun as it sounds), and a lot of screen time is burned without a whole lot of character development (we get it: he’s obsessed, and she’s had it up to here). Spielberg also gets a little too cute with the Devil’s Tower compulsion, belaboring Roy’s unconscious noodling, drawing, sculpting and construction of flat top mountains before he finally notices that his inspiration is right there on the TV! Then it’s a cross-country scamper to Wyoming with fellow traveler Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon, who’s marvelous but underexploited emotionally, especially since she plays the mom of a toddler who’s been abducted by aliens), a sit-down with fellow wide-eyed obsessive, the French scientist Claude Lacombe (Truffaut), and finally the mounting of the Tower. But the Tower is merely a location, not the destination. Not exactly a red herring, the land mass is more like a knowable entity in the midst of the unknowable, a tangible goal as the unfathomable waits right around the corner.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Jonathan Kirshner: When Critics Mattered -- Kael, Ebert, and ’70s Film
When Critics Mattered: Kael, Ebert, and ’70s Film
by Jonathan Kirshner
Boston Review
The years from the late 1960s through the middle of the 1970s were remarkable ones for American movies. In the words of critic David Thompson, it was “the decade when movies mattered.”
With the collapse of the draconian censorship regime that had imposed a strict moral code on the content of films, the decline of the studio system, and economic and demographic changes in both the industry and its audience, a window of opportunity opened for a new type of commercial film. At the same time, the content of these movies was inevitably shaped by the social and political upheavals of the era: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, and the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon presidency.
These films, filmmakers, and, implicitly, their audiences, were dubbed the “New Hollywood.” New to reflect their relative youth, but also as a nod to the foundational influence of the New European cinemas of the 1950s and 1960s; Hollywood because the makers of these personal, ambitious, arty films nevertheless hoped to return a fair profit. During this golden age, a night at the movies was still an evening’s entertainment, but it was also an invitation to discuss important works of art that were shaped by, and in dialogue with, the political, social, and philosophical issues of their times.
The New Hollywood was a cinema of moral ambiguity. The notorious Production Code Authority, in ruins by the close of 1966, had insisted on movies about right and wrong, with right winning in the end. By contrast, in the world portrayed by the “’70s film” (and in tune with the tenor of the times) choices are not always easy and obvious (Klute, The King of Marvin Gardens), authorities and institutions are compromised (Medium Cool, The Friends of Eddie Coyle), and, finally, the “hero” rarely wins (Chinatown, Night Moves). Individually ’70s films offer character-driven explorations of troubled, imperfect protagonists and complex interpersonal relationships, with no obvious solutions or clean resolutions proffered (or expected). Collectively they reflect a thriving and identifiable film culture—movies that “don’t supply reassuring smiles or self-righteous messages,” but share “a new openminded interest in examining American experience,” as the critic Pauline Kael put it at the time. “Our filmmakers seem to be on a quest—looking to understand what has been shaping our lives.”
These were movies to talk about, and fight about, and accordingly it was also the decade when the critics mattered. An ambitious cohort of film critics, shaped by new sensibilities, expectations, and experiences, led a tumultuous public debate about the movies, their meaning, and their relationship with society. Of these critics, the argumentative, bohemian Kael was the most influential. A singular voice in the Berkeley film scene during the 1950s, Kael made her way East supported by a Guggenheim fellowship and then landed a job at McCall’s, from which she was fired soon after dismissing The Sound of Music (1965) as “a sugarcoated lie.” A brief stint at The New Republic also ended unhappily, but in 1968 she would land, and remain, at The New Yorker, having established her reputation with an elaborate, breathtaking defense of Bonnie and Clyde (1967). That review fills out twenty exhilarating pages of her new Selected Writings, and it remains well worth reading (and re-reading). Kael wrote in a distinct, jazz-inflected style, offering a personal, emotional reaction to what she saw on the screen. Her reviews were steeped in the rich context of film history, but, in contrast to the stentorian lectures of many authoritative critics, Kael told you what she felt, and if she didn’t feel it, it wasn’t worth seeing. (Her first collection of reviews was called I Lost it at the Movies.)
Bonnie and Clyde, in what would become a watershed moment in the emergence of the New Hollywood, was originally dismissed and buried by establishment critics as a brutal, immoral farce. With its outlaw heroes, rule-breaking portrayal of bloody violence, and counter-culture sensibilities, Bonnie and Clyde was particularly offensive to critics such as Bosley Crowther, the enormously influential guardian of good taste at the New York Times, who famously trashed the film in print not once but three times. Kael, in dissent, opened her review with a question: “How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?” For Kael, “Bonnie and Clyde brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about.” It is a film that “upsets people,” even viewers who pride themselves in maintaining an emotional distance from what they see on the screen. But “Bonnie and Clyde, by making us care about the robber lovers, has put the sting back in death.”
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Jonathan Kirshner
Boston Review
The years from the late 1960s through the middle of the 1970s were remarkable ones for American movies. In the words of critic David Thompson, it was “the decade when movies mattered.”
With the collapse of the draconian censorship regime that had imposed a strict moral code on the content of films, the decline of the studio system, and economic and demographic changes in both the industry and its audience, a window of opportunity opened for a new type of commercial film. At the same time, the content of these movies was inevitably shaped by the social and political upheavals of the era: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, and the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon presidency.
These films, filmmakers, and, implicitly, their audiences, were dubbed the “New Hollywood.” New to reflect their relative youth, but also as a nod to the foundational influence of the New European cinemas of the 1950s and 1960s; Hollywood because the makers of these personal, ambitious, arty films nevertheless hoped to return a fair profit. During this golden age, a night at the movies was still an evening’s entertainment, but it was also an invitation to discuss important works of art that were shaped by, and in dialogue with, the political, social, and philosophical issues of their times.
The New Hollywood was a cinema of moral ambiguity. The notorious Production Code Authority, in ruins by the close of 1966, had insisted on movies about right and wrong, with right winning in the end. By contrast, in the world portrayed by the “’70s film” (and in tune with the tenor of the times) choices are not always easy and obvious (Klute, The King of Marvin Gardens), authorities and institutions are compromised (Medium Cool, The Friends of Eddie Coyle), and, finally, the “hero” rarely wins (Chinatown, Night Moves). Individually ’70s films offer character-driven explorations of troubled, imperfect protagonists and complex interpersonal relationships, with no obvious solutions or clean resolutions proffered (or expected). Collectively they reflect a thriving and identifiable film culture—movies that “don’t supply reassuring smiles or self-righteous messages,” but share “a new openminded interest in examining American experience,” as the critic Pauline Kael put it at the time. “Our filmmakers seem to be on a quest—looking to understand what has been shaping our lives.”
These were movies to talk about, and fight about, and accordingly it was also the decade when the critics mattered. An ambitious cohort of film critics, shaped by new sensibilities, expectations, and experiences, led a tumultuous public debate about the movies, their meaning, and their relationship with society. Of these critics, the argumentative, bohemian Kael was the most influential. A singular voice in the Berkeley film scene during the 1950s, Kael made her way East supported by a Guggenheim fellowship and then landed a job at McCall’s, from which she was fired soon after dismissing The Sound of Music (1965) as “a sugarcoated lie.” A brief stint at The New Republic also ended unhappily, but in 1968 she would land, and remain, at The New Yorker, having established her reputation with an elaborate, breathtaking defense of Bonnie and Clyde (1967). That review fills out twenty exhilarating pages of her new Selected Writings, and it remains well worth reading (and re-reading). Kael wrote in a distinct, jazz-inflected style, offering a personal, emotional reaction to what she saw on the screen. Her reviews were steeped in the rich context of film history, but, in contrast to the stentorian lectures of many authoritative critics, Kael told you what she felt, and if she didn’t feel it, it wasn’t worth seeing. (Her first collection of reviews was called I Lost it at the Movies.)
Bonnie and Clyde, in what would become a watershed moment in the emergence of the New Hollywood, was originally dismissed and buried by establishment critics as a brutal, immoral farce. With its outlaw heroes, rule-breaking portrayal of bloody violence, and counter-culture sensibilities, Bonnie and Clyde was particularly offensive to critics such as Bosley Crowther, the enormously influential guardian of good taste at the New York Times, who famously trashed the film in print not once but three times. Kael, in dissent, opened her review with a question: “How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?” For Kael, “Bonnie and Clyde brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about.” It is a film that “upsets people,” even viewers who pride themselves in maintaining an emotional distance from what they see on the screen. But “Bonnie and Clyde, by making us care about the robber lovers, has put the sting back in death.”
To Read the Rest of the Essay
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