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Film Criticism and the Making of the New American Cinema, 1959-1975

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Film Criticism and the Making of the New American Cinema, 1959-1975 - Making cinema anew: film criticism and the making of the new American cinema, 1959-1975. Oudenhoven, James https://iro.uiowa.edu/discovery/delivery/01IOWA_INST:ResearchRepository/12782142050002771?l#13782142040002771 Oudenhoven, J. (2020). Making cinema anew: film criticism and the making of the new American cinema, 1959-1975 [University of Iowa]. https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.005341 https://iro.uiowa.edu Copyright 2020 James Oudenhoven Downloaded on 2021/10/03 15:03:40 -0500 - Making Cinema Anew: Film Criticism and the Making of the New American Cinema, 1959- 1975 by James Oudenhoven A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in American Studies in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa May 2020 Thesis Committee: Lauren Rabinovitz, Thesis Supervisor Laura Rigal Steven Ungar Travis Vogan Deborah Whaley Acknowledgements This dissertation was supported by a CLAS Dissertation Writing Fellowship that provided me the time and financial support I needed to complete my research. I would like to acknowledge and thank my committee members, Laura Rigal, Steven Ungar, Travis Vogan, and Deborah Whaley. Each member improved the quality of this dissertation, and I sincerely appreciate the time and effort they put into working on this project. I especially want to thank Lauren Rabinovitz. This project was inspired by her work, and she provided me needed support and encouragement. Lauren has read more of my work than anyone else, and her editorial voice will be with me for some time to come. I am grateful for her dedication to this project and proud that this is the last dissertation she directed. I need to thank my friends and family who have supported me throughout this process. The friendship and support of Diann, Mike, and Justin was important to me throughout my time at Iowa. I want to thank my captious friend Andrew, whose unusual advice helped motivate me when I was feeling discouraged. I need to thank my loving and appreciative family. I was privileged to be raised by Betsy and Duane, who valued art, education, and the Green Bay Packers. They have always supported me, and they recognized my potential when I could not. I want to thank my sister, Mollie, who is both incredibly smart and hard-working. Finally, I need to thank my wife, Heather, and daughter, Violet. Heather provided me the love and support I need to finish – while providing a sympathetic ear throughout the process – and I will be forever thankful. Violet, I hope you discover the sustaining joys of reading, writing, and watching films. I look forward to watching movies with you in the years to come. ii Abstract In postwar America, as Hollywood experienced profound economic and industrial changes, film critics Pauline Kael, Jonas, Mekas, and Parker Tyler helped Americans reassess the cinema’s value to American culture while demonstrating the political value of film criticism. This dissertation provides analysis of film critics Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler’s critique of the “New American Cinema” that accounted for the cultural and industrial changes that influenced American independent, experimental, and “New” Hollywood cinema produced from 1959-71. In their criticism of the New American Cinema, Kael, Mekas, and Tyler challenged proposed binaries between “high” and “low” culture, fine art and popular culture, and mainstream and marginal culture, and they moved American film criticism beyond aesthetic analysis that was motivated by anxieties about the cinema’s lack of cultural value. But crucially, Kael, Mekas, and Tyler used film criticism to analyze American identity and social values in terms of class and taste, gender and cultural discourse, and sexuality and aesthetics. Pauline Kael challenged hierarchies of “high” and “low” culture in her celebration of the “New Hollywood” as popular culture and populist art. Jonas Mekas promoted American independent and experimental cinema by challenging middle-class values of consumption and conformity. Parker Tyler provided analysis of experimental “underground” cinema’s representations of sexuality and appropriation of queer aesthetics. Ultimately, Kael, Mekas, and Tyler used their criticism of the New American Cinema to change domestic reception of the cinema by disclosing the political value of film criticism and the cultural value of cinema. iii Public Abstract In the 1960s, film critics Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler changed how Americans thought about the cinema. In responding to the American experimental, independent, and New Hollywood cinema that constituted the New American Cinema (1959-71), Kael, Mekas, and Tyler used film criticism that appeared in mainstream publications like the New Yorker, alternative publications like the Village Voice, and specialized art and cinema magazines to demonstrate the cinema’s value to American culture and to analyze social issues through film writing. In their criticism of the New American Cinema, Kael, Mekas, and Tyler created a political film criticism that analyzed American identity in terms of class, gender, and sexuality, and they appealed to educated readers, who were interested in serious criticism that did more than promote Hollywood’s latest release. These critics also brought greater recognition to American experimental, independent, and “New” Hollywood cinema. In sum, Kael, Tyler, and Mekas changed American film criticism by demonstrating the cultural value of the American cinema, initiating a greater awareness of American social and cultural issues through film writing, and they anticipated contemporary popular film reception that focuses on identity and alternative film reception that considers non-mainstream cinema. iv Table of Contents Introduction A “New” Sensibility: Film Criticism and Reception of the New 1 American Cinema Chapter 1 Receiving the New American Cinema 34 Chapter 2 American Cinema as Popular Art: Pauline Kael and the New Hollywood 65 Chapter 3 Jonas Mekas’ Visionary Cinema: The New American Cinema And Cultural Renewal 95 Chapter 4 Against Propaganda: Parker Tyler’s Subcultural Criticism and the Underground 134 Conclusion Popular Culture is Political Culture: The Legacy of Critics of the New American Cinema 166 Bibliography 177 v Introduction A “New” Sensibility: Film Criticism and Reception of the New American Cinema Intellectuals have debated the American cinema’s cultural, aesthetic, and moral value since its early days of production. Silent cinema, produced in the early twentieth century, was popular with working-class and immigrant audiences, who appreciated its direct visual appeal, but intellectuals often dismissed this cinema as a “numbing, escapist drug for the masses.”1 At the end of the 1920s, Hollywood standardized production with the “studio system” and controlled exhibition and distribution until the dissolution of the system in 1948. While most Americans enjoyed the cinema as entertainment during this “golden age” of the studio system, intellectuals continued to worry about the cinema’s deleterious effect on culture. During the Second World War, Marxist intellectual Theodor Adorno, an émigré from Germany, argued that audiences who succumbed to the easy pleasure of cultural consumption like cinema spectatorship would be interpellated as subjects of mass ideology. Adorno failed to consider audience agency or resistance, but his arguments influenced a postwar generation of Marxist cultural analysis. In the 1940s and 50s, American art critics like Clement Greenberg embraced Adorno’s arguments about the dialectical opposition of art and popular culture, and, in his influential 1939 essay “Avant- Garde and Kitsch,” Greenberg argues that “kitsch” like Hollywood cinema would allow “totalitarian regimes to ingratiate themselves with subjects.”2 1 Qtd. In Phillip Lopate, introduction to American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now, ed. Phillip Lopate (New York: Library of America, 2008), xiv. 2 Clement Greenberg. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” In The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgements, 1939-44, ed. by John O’Brian (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 26. 1 By the 1950s, however, as Marxist intellectuals worried about the effects of popular culture, a pioneering generation of film critics initiated a different conversation about the American cinema. Postwar film critics like James Agee and Otis Ferguson recognized the cultural value of Hollywood, which intellectuals continued to dismiss as disposable mass culture, but their reassessment of the cinema reflected a larger shift in how Americans perceived culture. During the early Cold War, Abstract Expressionism symbolized American values of freedom and individuality, which contrasted with the authoritarian nature of Soviet communism, and an educated middle-class audience embraced this form of modernist art. Painter Jackson Pollack appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1949, and his paintings represented the ascendency of postwar American art. But as abstract expression was consumed by a middle-class audience, modernist cultural production that appealed to an intellectual elite was institutionalized in the academy and artistic developments like Minimalism responded to Abstract Expression’s popularity with formalist abstraction. However, a split between modernist “high” art, which was received by elites in art museums, symphony halls, and universities, and mainstream modernist art like Abstract Expressionism, which was popularized through publications
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