Major/New Filmmakers of the Seventies

While many 60’s filmmakers trained in television 1970s directors from film schools (Friedkin, Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese, and Spielberg) who had studied history, aesthetics, and production as formal academic. Displayed technical and stylistic panache of New Wave: vs. invisible art.

Francis Ford Coppola

Most prestigious filmmaker of 70s. Won Oscar for co-script of Patton (1970). The Godfather (1972) & Godfather II (1974) films called ‟an epic vision of the corruption of America” by Pauline Kael. Mafia family used as a metaphor for corruption in all spheres of power including big business and govt.

George Lucas

With American Graffiti (1973) and Star Wars (1977) with unprecedented use of computer tech to generate special photographic and auditory effects (first widely released film to be both recorded and exhibited in Dolby stereo-optical sound.)

Steven Spielberg

Filmmaker most attuned to the sensibility of the New Optimism era. with Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters (1977)

E.T. (1982) is his masterpiece.  a sci-fi fantasy, but far more powerful in emotional impact.  Less plotted than Spielberg’s other movies, E.T. is a film of poetic textures and nuances.  It puts us back in touch w. the beauty and innocence of children, triggering childhood memories of imaginary best friends, scary-looking creatures, the Unknown.  Spielberg contrasts the reassuring rituals of suburban America w. the awesome wonders of a superior alien culture, and he manages to bridge the gap, making the future seem a little less fearful and, possibly, an enthralling adventure.  Displaced Star Wars as the top money-maker in history–$500 to 600 mill worldwide.

Martin Scorsese

Grew up in violent ‟Little Italy,” an Italian American ghetto in NYC reflected in Mean Streets (1972), Taxi Driver (1976) et al.

Most of his protags are groping, inarticulate, trying desperately to break out of the confines of their narrow lives, so often they resort to violence.

Characteristic preoccupations: urban violence, class conflicts, alienation, macho rituals, and ethnic identity.

Seldom slick or polished.  Frequent gaps in the continuity of the story, and instead of concluding smoothly, they often simply stop.  In part this ragged quality is deliberate, paralleling the raggedness of the character’s lives.

Scorsese also likes to improvise on the set and shoots massive amounts of footage.  In the editing stage, he is forced to discard many of these scenes to confine his movie to a reasonable running time–hence the rough, jumpy scenes of discontinuity.

 

Raging Bull, a bio of Jack La Motta, the middle-weight boxing champion of the 1940s is visceral in its impact, yet paradoxically filled w. images of striking beauty.  Michael Chapman’s striking B&W cinematog is harshly contrasting, w. virtually no grays to mediate between the extremes of light and dark–a tribute to the American film noir of the 1940s.  The hand-held cam often swirls out of control, kineticizing the mise en scene w. a terrifying mercurial instability.  At other times, the camera glides overhead, choreographed in slow motion to the majestically solemn music of Mascagni.  Many of the camera angles are low and steep, the fighters towering above us like savage combatants.  The staccato editing style jams the images together to produce a sense of frenzied collision.  Scorsese intercuts brief shots of sweat pouring down torsos, blood splattering off a fighter’s face as he’s dealt a stupefying blow, sponges soaked in bloodied water as it pours over the boxers’ overheated bodies.  The soundtrack throbs with the thud of leather pounding flesh, hissing noises, and animal screeches, as though we were in a primordial jungle.  The sound fades in and out, suggesting a diminishment of consciousness.  The boxing arenas are steaming pits, suffocating in smoke and rising heat waves that ripples the surface of the images.  Glaring spotlights tear up the pervasive blackness of these infernal regions, producing a sense of visual anguish. 1989 poll of film critics–Raging Bull voted greatest American film of the 1980s.

WATCH: Raging Bull -“You Never Got Me Down” clip

Raging Bull clip – CC

Robert Altman

–said to be most important (PRODUCTIVE) filmmaker (producer/director) working within the American commercial system of the 1970s; older than rest who came to prominence during this era–In the seventies, Altman saw us with our raw nerves exposed at a time in American history when the conflicting demands of community and individual freedom were never more extreme, and he became an epic poet of that conflict.

Emphasis on characterization: Explores characters in groups that are in a state of flux, where human affections are transitory, provisional.  In the harsher films like Nashville (1975) the characters are left w. their dreams dispersed, the fragile strands of love and affection ended–often by a traumatizing death.  the fragile strands of love and affection.  Almost invariably, the movies conclude on a note of loss, disintegration, and defeat.

  • essentially pessimistic view of the human condition, though often expressed in sardonic humor & comic form
  • –like many of his European counterparts, Altman abandoned conventional narrative to develop his own highly personal style.
  • De-emphasis of plot in favor of improvisation and chance requiring images
  • be composed on the spot as well—similar to documentaries.
  •             a subversion of genre expectations (most are genre, all in revisionist mode)

Throwaway style of acting, based on improv: liked element of chance. Use of overlapping dialogue. He sometimes used multiple cams to capture a variety of viewpoints of the same scene.  Believed not in planning but capturing.  Able to convey a sense of spontaneity, surprise.

M*A*S*H (1970) –characterized by subversive combination of humor and gore, and it makes effective use of the wide-angle Panavision compositions and overlapping dialogue for which Altman has become justly famous.

WATCH: Nashville trailer

With closed captions

Nashville (1975) is nearly three hours long.  Concerns the lives of 24 separate characters in the five-day period preceding a rally to be given at the city’s Parthenon for the “Replacement Party” presidential candidate, Hal Philip Walker (whose ironic campaign slogan is “New Roots for the Nation”).  The characters all come from diff walks of life, but they have one thing in common: all are seeking either to become or to remain celebrities in the world of country music and, but extension, of American mass-mediated culture at large.   Lives coalesce at the political rally which concludes the film, where a young assassin who has come there to kill Walker kills one of the celebrities instead.

About the ways in which our natl. entertainment media and our natl. politics–all but indistinguishable from one another–work constantly to distract us from the massive inequalities of our society and the violence of our recent natl. past….Altman finds many American virtues to admire, but the most important theme of Nashville is how quickly we forget and gloss over such things as the terrible public violence of the sixties and the human consequences of the war in Vietnam. Its most urgent comment is that we Americans, in our blind pursuit of success and our compulsive need for social change, are leading unexamined lives.

Three Women (1977) about the psyche of women with mythical undertones which becomes increasingly mysterious

Woody Allen

Allen is Jewish, intellectual, and a New Yorker–three important aspects of his persona and his sensibility. This type emphasizes ethnic clichés: guilt, neurosis, sexual obsessiveness, inadequacy anxieties, Jewish mothers, and so on.  New York Jewish comedy skeptical, understated, and wryly ironic.  It is often directed at the self.  Allen’s humor is strongly intellectual, though it sometimes takes the form of anti-intellectualism.  His gags sometimes allude to such highbrow literary figs as Kafka and Strindberg, but Allen is equally adept at slapstick.  No other film artist can match the sheer breadth of his comic arsenal. Beginning w. his first masterpiece Annie Hall the autobio side predominated.  In both substance and style, AH represented a new direction for Allen.  Essentially a romantic comedy, the film is bittersweet and poignant, appealing more to the emotions than his previous works, which were funny but rarely moving.  Annie Hall (1977) is essentially a romantic comedy, bittersweet and poignant, appealing more to the emotions than his previous works, which were funny but rarely moving (Bananas, Sleeper).

WATCH: Annie Hall opening

With closed captions

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