Hollywood's Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America

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Jonathan Kirshner

Hollywood's Last Golden Age

Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America

Jonathan Kirshner

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English

Cornell University Press
15 November 2012

Film theory & criticism; Film & movie: styles & genres; History of the Americas; 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000; Political science & theory

Between 1967 and 1976 a number of extraordinary factors converged to produce an uncommonly adventurous era in the history of American film. The end of censorship, the decline of the studio system, economic changes in the industry, and demographic shifts among audiences, filmmakers, and critics created an unprecedented opportunity for a new type of Hollywood movie, one that Jonathan Kirshner identifies as the ""seventies film."" In Hollywood's Last Golden Age, Kirshner shows the ways in which key films from this period-including Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Graduate, and Nashville, as well as underappreciated films such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Klute, and Night Moves-were important works of art in continuous dialogue with the political, social, personal, and philosophical issues of their times. These ""seventies films"" reflected the era's social and political upheavals: the civil rights movement, the domestic consequences of the Vietnam war, the sexual revolution, women's liberation, the end of the long postwar economic boom, the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon Administration and Watergate. Hollywood films, in this brief, exceptional moment, embraced a new aesthetic and a new approach to storytelling, creating self-consciously gritty, character-driven explorations of moral and narrative ambiguity. Although the rise of the blockbuster in the second half of the 1970s largely ended Hollywood's embrace of more challenging films, Kirshner argues that seventies filmmakers showed that it was possible to combine commercial entertainment with serious explorations of politics, society, and characters' interior lives.

By: Jonathan Kirshner
Imprint: Cornell University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: 1
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 155mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 907g
ISBN: 9780801451348
ISBN 10: 0801451345
Pages: 277
Publication Date: 15 November 2012
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Jonathan Kirshner is Stephen and Barbara Friedman Professor of International Political Economy at Cornell University.

Reviews for Hollywood's Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America

The author, a professor of government at Cornell, draws a clear correlation between the rather startling shift in American filmmaking (increased violence and sexual themes, more overt establishment motifs, the rise of the antihero) and political and social events of the 1950s and early '60s (such as the sexual revolution, the war in Vietnam, the assassinations of key political figures, the Communist witch hunts). Libraries with active film-history collections will want to add this one. David Pitt, Booklist (1 November 2012)