American Auteur Cinema: the Last – Or First – Great Picture Show 37 Thomas Elsaesser
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For many lovers of film, American cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s – dubbed the New Hollywood – has remained a Golden Age. AND KING HORWATH PICTURE SHOW ELSAESSER, AMERICAN GREAT THE LAST As the old studio system gave way to a new gen- FILMFILM FFILMILM eration of American auteurs, directors such as Monte Hellman, Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Rafel- CULTURE CULTURE son, Martin Scorsese, but also Robert Altman, IN TRANSITION IN TRANSITION James Toback, Terrence Malick and Barbara Loden helped create an independent cinema that gave America a different voice in the world and a dif- ferent vision to itself. The protests against the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement and feminism saw the emergence of an entirely dif- ferent political culture, reflected in movies that may not always have been successful with the mass public, but were soon recognized as audacious, creative and off-beat by the critics. Many of the films TheThe have subsequently become classics. The Last Great Picture Show brings together essays by scholars and writers who chart the changing evaluations of this American cinema of the 1970s, some- LaLastst Great Great times referred to as the decade of the lost generation, but now more and more also recognised as the first of several ‘New Hollywoods’, without which the cin- American ema of Francis Coppola, Steven Spiel- American berg, Robert Zemeckis, Tim Burton or Quentin Tarantino could not have come into being. PPictureicture NEWNEW HOLLYWOODHOLLYWOOD ISBN 90-5356-631-7 CINEMACINEMA ININ ShowShow EDITEDEDITED BY BY THETHE 1970S1970S THOMASTHOMAS ELSAESSER ELSAESSER ALEXANDERALEXANDER HORWATH HORWATH 9 789053 566317 NOELNOEL KING KING Amsterdam University Press AmsterdamAmsterdam UniversityUniversity PressPress WWW.AUP.NL The Last Great American Picture Show The Last Great American Picture Show New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s edited by Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel King Amsterdam University Press Front and back cover illustration: Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde (1967, Arthur Penn) Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: japes, Amsterdam isbn 90 5356 493 4 (hardcover) isbn 90 5356 631 7 (paperback) nur 674 © Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2004 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, me- chanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permis- sion of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Table of Contents 5 Table of Contents Part One Introductions The Impure Cinema: New Hollywood 1967-1976 9 Alexander Horwath ”The Last Good Time We Ever Had”: Remembering the New Hollywood Cinema 19 Noel King American Auteur Cinema: The Last – or First – Great Picture Show 37 Thomas Elsaesser Part Two Histories The Decade When Movies Mattered 73 David Thomson A Walking Contradiction (Partly Truth and Partly Fiction) 83 Alexander Horwath The Exploitation Generation. or: How Marginal Movies Came in from the Cold 107 Maitland McDonagh New Hollywood and the Sixties Melting Pot 131 Jonathan Rosenbaum Part Three People and Places Dinosaurs in the Age of the Cinemobile 155 Richard T. Jameson ”The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name”: The Films of Monte Hellman 165 Kent Jones 6 The Last Great American Picture Show Nashville contra Jaws, or “The Imagination of Disaster” Revisited 195 J. Hoberman For Wanda 223 Bérénice Reynaud Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: The Uneasy Ride of Hollywood and Rock 249 Howard Hampton Auteurism and War-teurism: Terrence Malick’s War Movie 267 Dana Polan Part Four Critical Debates The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 1970s: Notes on the Unmotivated Hero 279 Thomas Elsaesser Trapped in the Affection Image: Hollywood’s Post-traumatic Cycle (1970-1976) 293 Christian Keathley Grim Fascination: Fingers, James Toback and 1970s American Cinema 309 Adrian Martin Allegories of Post-Fordism in 1970s New Hollywood: Countercultural Combat Films and Conspiracy Thrillers as Genre Recycling 333 Drehli Robnik Bibliography 359 List of Contributors 371 Pictures (with credits) 375 Index of Film Titles 377 Part One Introductions The Impure Cinema: New Hollywood 1967-1976 Alexander Horwath 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, recita- tions of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official government de- livery 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.1 The 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 ro- mantic 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 – some- time between Bonnie and Clyde and Taxi Driver – you’ve probably experi- enced 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 account – even 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 un- derwent a crucial shift in emphasis. Towards the end of the Seventies, the in- creasingly complex narrative negotiation of (both fictional and very real) con- tradictions and conflicts started to recede behind the phantasms of a neo- conservative discourse of re-mythologisation, re-evangelisation and re-milita- risation, 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 affir- mation of shop-worn myths and relying more on textures, surfaces, aural- 10 The Last Great American Picture Show visual effects and on “somatic” audience responses. Films such as Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman – The Movie, Alien, The Empire Strikes Back or Raiders of the Lost Ark strove to be seen repeat- edly, their exhilarating physical effects had to be felt over and over again in the cinema (it was the last pre-VCR era). Parallel to these experiences, however, I retrospectively began to explore the cinema of the Sixties and early Seventies – propelled by my first contact with very different and irritating Hollywood movies like Apocalypse Now and Raging Bull. Around 1980/81, the “Star-Kino”, a repertory house in Vi- enna, offered the opportunity to view within the space of a few months The Godfather (both parts one after another), Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, the complete works of Sam Peckinpah, Easy Rider, The Long Goodbye, Nashville, Zabriskie Point, Alice’s Res- taurant, Little Big Man, Klute, All the President’s Men and Shampoo. There was a stark and inspiring contrast between these works (and their view- ing context: a small, dingy suburban repertory theatre) and, on the other hand, the new spectacular films (usually shown in the “Gartenbau-Kino”, an 800- seat picture palace on the Ringstrasse in Vienna, practically designed for intox- icating “feelie” effects). This contrast has grown larger over time, so much so that it now seems reasonable to speak in terms of fundamentally different tem- poral and aesthetic zones. The mixture of styles and subject matter that, for simplicity’s sake, shall be called “New Hollywood” here, could of course still be located in films made after 1977 (in the early Eighties, for instance, Blade Runner represented the fragile intersection of the two halves of my film world).3 And even during the past fifteen years many of the (few) important American films still had their reference points – in terms of personnel, aesthetics, subject matter or attitude – in the culture of the Seventies: The Thin Red Line, Short Cuts, L.A. Confi- dential and Bulworth; the work of Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, John Sayles and Clint Eastwood;4 Jackie Brown, George Washington and My Own Private Idaho; the work of Richard Linklater, Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson (as well as the much-maligned, but fascinating films of Sean Penn); Drugstore Cowboy, Another Day in Paradise and Jesus’ Son; The Ice Storm, Velvet Goldmine, Almost Famous ... and last but not least, Texasville and The Two Jakes, two extremely rich – if sadly under-praised – sequels and reinterpretations of classics from the New Hollywood era (The Last Picture Show and Chinatown). On the other hand, the American “Indie” movement of the 1980s and 1990s, widely regarded as a new alternative to the major studios’ increasingly conser- vative production and distribution policies, seems to have exhausted itself – at least as a viable cultural-political movement – and split into multiple direc- The Impure Cinema: New Hollywood 1967-1976 11 Ben Johnson in The Last Picture Show tions. Often connected to a niche consciousness, the standard-bearers of inde- pendent cinema consequently helped to establish a niche market, which could then easily be appropriated or inhaled by the mainstream industry. The impor- tant “Indie” companies of the Eighties and Nineties are today part of or closely associated with major studios.