1. The Film School Generation
Belton, Chapter 16

2. THE NEW WAVE
 Group of French film critics
watched old movies at the
Cinémathèque Française during
40s and 50s.
 the explosion of films made by
young, first-time French
directors (Belton 363).
 Cahiers du Cinéma, a critical film
journal, without formalized
training or apprenticeships like
their predecessors, these critics
begin making their own films…
 New Wave Directors: Francois
Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric
Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and
Claude Chabrol.
 Began in 1958 with Chabrol s Le
Beau Serge

3. Auteur Theory: Directors as Stars
 American critic Andrew
Sarris brought the
perspectives and criticism
of the Cahiers du cinéma
(Cinema Notebooks) to the
U.S. – auteur theory
 Caused a reevaluation of
American cinema by critics,
students, scholars, and film
buffs
 Not as many successful
directors emerge from
American efforts as did in
France

4. Training Ground:
The Rise of Film Schools
 Hollywood looked favorably upon film students than upon film
critics as directors.
 They were uncritical of the industry, eager to succeed in it, and
appreciative of its history.
 They could also be paid less than older, more experienced directors.
 After the collapse of the studio system, film schools functioned to
provide a pool of semiskilled talent on which the industry could
draw.
 Film gradually became a feature of a contemporary liberal arts
education. In 1967, 200 schools and 1500 film courses were offered.
Eleven years later, 1,000 schools and 10,000 film courses were
offered.
 The new young audience sought films that addressed their
interests. Like Coppola, Lucas, and Scorsese, they had grown up on
the movies. They both appreciated the film school generation and
understood many of the allusions to earlier films and filmmakers
that peppered movies directed by members of the American New
Wave.

5. The Color of Money:
Young Directors and the Box Office
 Film industry turned to the New Film School Generation for
economic reasons (i.e. to make money).
Youth Films and Economics: younger audiences.
The Roger Corman School
 Hollywood turned to the master of the exploitation film where
profitable directors had gained practical experience
 Hollywood will adopt tactics of the exploitation market (e.g.
gangster films, teen hot-rod flicks, science fiction adventures,
monster pictures, and horror films).
Exploitation on a Grand Scale
 Rather than approaching these genre films with low-budgets,
Hollywood backing led to big-budget productions and added
profitability
 Hollywood no longer used audience response-based release tactics,
they increased marketing and advertising efforts (see Jaws example
discussed on p. 369).
 Why does this new method appeal to Hollywood?

6. Examples…
 Steven Spielberg had many
box office successes. E.T. ,
Jaws , Jurassic Park ,
Raiders of the Lost Ark , The
Lost World: Jurassic Park ,
and Saving Private Ryan .
 Lucas s successes were Star
Wars , The Empire Strikes
Back , The Return of the
Jedi , Star wars Episode I:
The Phantom Menace, Star
Wars II: The Attack of the
Clones, and Star Wars III.
 James Cameron, Titanic .

7. Famous Directors

8. The Roger Corman School
 Hopper, Bogdanovich, and Coppola had all received
practical experience in filmmaking by working for the
master of the exploitation film.
 Hopper had starred in a number of Corman teen pics
along with Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson.
 Corman gave Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola,
John Milius, Woody Allen, and Martin Scorsese a start.
 Corman helped Jonathan Demme and Jonathan Kaplan
make their first films.
 Hollywood tacitly acknowledged a significant shift in the
nature of the traditional Hollywood film in looking to
Corman proteges.

9. Exploitation on a Grand Scale.
 Even though many of the New Film School Generation films were
low-budget subjects, Hollywood gave them the big-budget
treatment. These films were often low-budget genre pictures in
disguise.
 Starting with Jaws , the major studios adopted the distribution
patterns developed in the exploitation market. That film was
released in 464 theaters at the same time. Ads were on both the
radio and the TV for the film, too.
 The industry marketed these films according to methods that had
proven effective in the exploitation field.
 Today, the first two Harry Potter films (2001,2002) opened on more
than 3600 screens, as did Spider-Man . Terminator 3: The Rise
of the Machines (2003), Scorpion King (2002), and Monsters
Inc. (2001) played on more tan 3400 screens.

10. Exploitation films

11. References, Meaning,
and Postmodernism
The Art of Allusion
 American Graffiti looked back at AIP teen pics, but also borrowed
from Federico Fellini s I Vitelloni .
 Raiders of the Lost Ark brought afternoon serials back to life.
 Woody Allen acknowledged Ingmar Bergman in Interiors ,
Federico Fellini in Stardust Memories , Humphrey Bogart in
Play it Again, Sam , the phenomenon of movie going in The
Purple Rose of Cairo , and the Hollywood musical in Everyone
Says I Love You .
 Spielberg fancied himself a new Disney. There are repeated
allusions to Disney s Mary Poppins in E.T. , Close Encounters
looks back to the Night on Bald Mountain sequence in Fantasia
and concludes with Jiminy Cricket s rendition of When You Wish
Upon a Star from Pinocchio . The Color Purple borrows visual
landscape from Disney s Uncle Remus narrative, The Song of the
South. Hook lays bare Spielberg s own Peter Pan complex and
solidifies his identity as the child of Disney.

12. The Failure of the New
 In Dressed to Kill , De Palma alluded to high art in the form of the
German Symbolist painter Max Klinger s Glove series and
popular art through a reference to Hitchcock s Vertigo .
 American cinema of the 1970s was a postmodern phenomenon that
reflected the sense of alienation and fragmentation brought about
by late capitalism.
 In terms of stylistic practices, postmodern artist rely on pastiche ,
a form of imitation of the unique style or content of earlier works
that lacks any trace of the satire or parody that characterizes
traditional forms of imitation. Pastiche is an entirely neutral
practice: it conveys no perceptible attitude towards the original.
 Thus, the authentic expression of ideas in the past has given way to
quotation and allusion to that authentic expression.

13. Schizophrenia and Incoherence
 Jameson referred to inability to be
original as failure of the new
 Another feature of postmodernism:
nostalgia for the past.
 American Graffiti is a nostalgia film.
 Postmodern works reflect the
schizophrenic breakdown of he
normal experience of the world
as a continuous, coherent, and
meaningful phenomenon.
 Postmodern artists convey the
incoherence that informs the social
and cultural reality of contemporary
experience.
 Terrence Malick s Badlands , an
outlaw couple film based on the real-
life 1950s killing spree of Charles
Starkweather and his girlfriend,
Carol Ann Fugate, capture this
sense of incoherence.

15. A Postmodern Case Study:
Taxi Driver
 A certain level of incoherence lies at the heart of Taxi Driver , embodied
in its central character, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro).
 His goals and desires remain unclear and confused, and so does the
audience s understanding of and attitude toward the character.
 That incoherence carries over into the audience.
 The film captures the plight of the alienated individual in contemporary
consumer society.
 Surrounded by the conflicting messages of politicians, pimps, and the
media, engulfed by filth, crime, and corruption, he attempts to play the part
of the old-fashioned Western hero whose decisive actions would set things
right.
 Films such as Taxi Driver expose the contradictions that informed 1970s
America, describing the conditions that produced phenomena such as
Vietnam and Watergate, but refusing to understand or make sense of those
conditions.
 One of the films repeated viewers was John Hinckley, the ultimate
incoherent spectator, who fell in love with Jodie Foster and shot the
politician, President Ronald Reagan, rather than the pimp, in an attempt to
re-write the film and give it a better ending.

16. Reassurance: Comfort, Comics, and
Nostalgia
A Return to Innocence
 Raiders of the Lost Ark returned
to the innocent action serials of the
1930s and 1940s and restored
moral clarity to the screen;
confusing morality of Vietnam and
returned to clear-cut villainy of
Nazis.
 Close Encounters of the Third
Kind encouraged us to regress tot
eh status of children-play with our
food, indulge in whims and
obsessions, and engage in a
childlike state of wonder.
 Star Wars was set in a universe
far, far away and long, long
go.

17. Opposing Visions
 Scorsese – one of few to expose
dilemmas of modern individual,
explores the disintegration and
fragmentation of any sense of
coherent self.
 Most financially successful films
of the 1970s and 80s reassured
audiences, idealized the past
(1930s-50s).
 Public disturbance in film
unwelcome in the marketplace.

18. Examples…(p. 377)
 Raging Bull is, like Travis in Taxi Driver a problematically split or
divided character, who talks to themselves in mirrors.
 In Goodfellas , Henry Hill who wants ot be somebody rather than nobody,
models his identity on that of the colorful gangsters who lived and worked
in his neighborhood when he was a kid. The film shows the disintegration
of this fantasy when, at the end of the film, he returns to be a nobody in the
witness protection program.
 In Kundun , the Dalai Lama is alienated and exiled, presented as a figure
unable to fulfill his preordained role in life.
 Gangs of New York traces that identity to its contradictory origins in the
struggle between different generations of immigrants, one largely
Protestant and the other mostly Catholic.

20. THE BRAT PACK
 The Outsiders reflected
1950s and 1960s
 Introduced a new generation
of actors – the brat pack-
who soon out-grossed a
previous earlier generation
of directors known as the
movie brats.

21. Physical Culture: Biology as
Destiny, Individualist Ruler
 Muscle men –Stallone and
Schwarzenegger.
 These He-Men of the Universe provided a
form of bodily spectacle and visual
pleasure that answered the growing
obsession with technology and special
effects that dominated the science-fiction
film (382).
 Fetishization of male body, 1980s
conservatism elevated biology to the
status of destiny, physical strength
ensures survival, not the market…
 Just think of all the money these legacies
continue to bring to Hollywood from
reissues, video games, sequels,
merchandising, etc.!!

22. ANOTHER GENERATION
 New directors with distinctly different cultural
experiences and filmmaking techniques;
 Continuity of classical Hollywood cinema falls apart in
1980s;
 Changes in society and marketplace: new media
technology, television, economics, etc.
 Exploitation marketing strategies used by directors
 Directors were highly motivated/restricted by market
demands - sought $100+ million profit, merchandisable
films, tie-ins, wanted Disney theme parks named after
their films