Abstract
A major trend in 1970s American film was studio and silent era set ‘movies about the movies’. A symptom of troubled times in Hollywood, this paradoxical genre simultaneously de-mystified and re-mystified movie glamour, celebrity and success, and satisfied cinemagoers’ schizophrenic impulses towards the questioning of America’s traditional myths and values, and their re-affirmation. Indeed, expressing both scepticism and romantic sentiment, most 1970s ‘movie movies’ attempted to play it both ways, apart from one notable exception and by far both the most ambitious and cynical of the cycle: The Day of the Locust (Schlesinger, 1975). Directed by New Wave auteur John Schlesinger and one of Paramount’s prestige historical releases, the film is significant for its uncompromising view of Hollywood’s world of illusions from the perspective of its struggling fringe players, and how it tests the ‘built-in’ contradiction of movies about the movies. This chapter provides an in-depth examination of the contextual factors that gave rise to the movie movie wave and the New Hollywood in general.
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Notes
- 1.
Roy Rosenzweig, and David P. Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 19.
- 2.
It is important to note this term is primarily a critical classification, and is not typically used in commercial, industrial or journalistic discourses.
- 3.
Marnie Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 4.
- 4.
James Chapman, H. Mark Glancy, and Sue Harper, The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 3–4.
- 5.
John E. O’Connor, and Martin A. Jackson, American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image (New York: Continuum, 1988), pp. xiv and xvii.
- 6.
Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 80.
- 7.
Marc Ferro, Cinema and History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), p. 161–2.
- 8.
See chapter 1 of Robert Brent Toplin, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (Lawrence: University Press Of Kansas, 2002).
- 9.
Toplin, Reel History, p. 4.
- 10.
Robert A. Rosenstone, History on Film, Film on History: Concepts, Theories and Practice (Harlow: Longman/Pearson, 2006), pp. 161–2.
- 11.
Rosenstone, History on Film, pp. 8, 16 and 48.
- 12.
Rosenstone, History on Film, p. 45.
- 13.
Toplin, Reel History, p. 97.
- 14.
Toplin, Reel History, pp. 89 and 108.
- 15.
Toplin, Reel History, pp. 114–118.
- 16.
Toplin, Reel History, pp. 118–123.
- 17.
Toplin, Reel History, pp. 131–135.
- 18.
Rosenstone, History on Film, pp. 39–49.
- 19.
Rosenstone, History on Film, p. 50.
- 20.
Chapman, Glancy, and Harper (eds.), The New Film History, p. 12.
- 21.
Sue Harper, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie Revisited: British Costume Film in the 1950s’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book (London: BFI publishing, 1997), p. 133.
- 22.
Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘The Historical Film as Real History’, Film-Historia, vol. 5, no. 1 (1995), pp. 21–22.
- 23.
Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to Movies, pp. 25 and 32.
- 24.
Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to Movies, pp. 9 and 32.
- 25.
Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to Movies, p. 6.
- 26.
Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to Movies, p. 191.
- 27.
David Eldridge, Hollywood’s History Films (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), p. 4.
- 28.
Eldridge, Hollywood’s History Films, p. 4.
- 29.
J. E. Smyth (ed.), Hollywood and the American Historical Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. xix.
- 30.
Eldridge, Hollywood’s History Films, p. 5.
- 31.
Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, and Imelda Whelehan (eds.), Retrovisions: Reinventing the Past in Film and Fiction (London: Pluto Press, 2001), p. 2.
- 32.
Vivian Sobchak, ‘“Surge and Splendor”: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 310.
- 33.
For an incisive critical overview of this debate see Noel King, ‘The New Hollywood’, in Pam Cook and Mieke Bernink (eds), The Cinema Book (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), pp. 98–105.
- 34.
Peter Krämer, The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars (London: Wallflower, 2005), p. 3. See also; Cook and Bernink, The Cinema Book, p. 98.
- 35.
Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. xii.
- 36.
Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
- 37.
Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 50. Wood’s essay was first published in Movie, no. 27–28, (1980/81), pp. 24–42.
- 38.
Paul Monaco, The Sixties: 1960–1969 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
- 39.
Krämer, The New Hollywood, p. 10.
- 40.
Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-‘N’-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
- 41.
Krämer, The New Hollywood, p. 4.
- 42.
Drew Casper, Hollywood Film 1963–1976: Years of Revolution and Reaction (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) p. xvi.
- 43.
See Sobchak, ‘“Surge and Splendor”’.
- 44.
‘Seriousness’, therefore, is an accolade conferred by scholars and cultural commentators, and not simply a textual effect or part of a film’s marketing strategy.
- 45.
Jonathan Stubbs, Historical Film: A Critical Introduction (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p. 111.
- 46.
Krämer, The New Hollywood, pp. 107–9.
- 47.
Kenneth M. Cameron, America on Film: Hollywood and American History (New York: Continuum, 1997), p. 224.
- 48.
Cameron, America on Film, p. 225.
- 49.
Cameron, America on Film, p. 164 + 225.
- 50.
Cook, Lost Illusions, p. 159.
- 51.
See Novotny Lawrence, Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and Genre (New York and London: Routledge, 2008).
- 52.
See also; Peter Lev, American Films of the ‘70s: Conflicting Visions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000).
- 53.
Cook, Lost Illusions, p. 161.
- 54.
Ray, A Certain Tendency, pp. 297–325.
- 55.
M. Keith Booker, Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Film and Why It Makes Us Feel So Strange (London: Praeger, 2007), p. 51.
- 56.
James Paris, ‘How Hollywood’s Memory’s Plays Tricks on Us’, The New York Times, 23 November, 1975, p. 15.
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Symmons, T. (2016). Introduction. In: The New Hollywood Historical Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52930-5_1
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