Year: 2004
Type: book
Abstract: So you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie. 1The title of this book suggests a certain cultural pessimism.It talks about a Golden Age and a closed chapter of history: The Last Great American Picture Show.Generally, demarcations of this sort are hard to justify and are more of a hindrance to an open engagement with films.They tend to originate in the romantic notion that cultural history unfolds in discrete episodes ("narratives"), and they often reflect the formative influences of the author.If you have come of age as a cinema-goer during the heyday of New Hollywood cinema -sometime between Bonnie and Clyde and Taxi Driver -you've probably experienced the main brands of post-1970s American cinema by necessity as less rich, less intelligent, less political, as retrograde.My own first experiences of the cinema stand in contrast to this accounteven if, in the end, they led to similar conclusions.I started to go the movies regularly at the end of the Seventies.Star Wars, which I saw six or seven times during 1977/78, propelled this habit.It's a film that fairly exactly marks the point at which public discourse and popular cinema in the United States underwent a crucial shift in emphasis.Towards the end of the Seventies, the increasingly complex narrative negotiation of (both fictional and very real) contradictions and conflicts started to recede behind the phantasms of a neoconservative discourse of re-mythologisation, re-evangelisation and re-militarisation, gradually disappearing from view altogether in the course of the Reaganite era.So in a sense my first cinema was already "post-classical" 2 and post-modern -a cinema of hyper-genres, often accompanied by an ironic affirmation of shop-worn myths and relying more on textures, surfaces, aural-10 The Last Great American Picture Show 20 The Last Great American Picture Show "The Last Good Time We Ever Had" 21 Randy Quaid, Jack Nicholson and Otis Young in The Last Detail genres such as madcap/screwball comedy.This New Hollywood practice of cinematic citation continued into the 1980s with Schrader's 1982 remake of Tourneur's 1942 horror classic, Cat People and American Gigolo (1980) concluding with an homage to Bresson's Pickpocket (1959).Schrader also cites Bertolucci's The Conformist (1969) as a film "I've stolen from ... repeatedly," and says that Nic Roeg/Douglas Cammell's film Performance (1970) "is very invigorating visually -if you ever need something to steal, that's a good one to check up".13If we were to add TV as another element in the intertextual-nostalgia-memorialisation process, Carroll could be describing attempts in the 1990s to unify parent and child via a nostalgic cinematic recovery of TV memory: witness such films as The Fugitive, The Flintstones, The Addams Family, Addams Family Values, Maverick, The Brady Bunch, The Beverly Hillbillies, Mission Impossible, The Avengers and The Saint.Carroll also claims that this citational cinematic practice assumed a particular reading competence on the part of its cinéliterate audience, resulting in a two-tiered genre film that united a strong action through-line derived from classical Hollywood genres, with some of the more recondite, abstract aspects of European art cinema: "there was the genre film pure and simple, and there was also the art film in the genre film."14 Functioning alongside the "movie brat" film school and often overlapping with it was another film school: the Roger Corman exploitation world of AIP and New World Films.Corman's influence on the New Hollywood can scarcely be overestimated.From his time with AIP through to his establishing of New World Films, Corman provided opportunities for such directors as
Authors: Elsaesser, T., Horwath, A., King, N.
Language: English
Topic: Cinema History and Criticism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: Macquarie University
OpenAlex ID: W4301037724