Contextual Studies - American new wave film

EVALUATION -

The overall film doesn't scream new wave however taking inspiration from pulp fiction I wanted the audience to follow a story in chapters however the overall story doesn't have a strong narrative due to the time limit.
In this video the aim was to show a new wave film within 2 minutes. I chose to base my film around a normal day for myself when I am not at college or work, the reason for this was the fact that I had access to locations I could film easily in, I also based my video around a specific moment from pulp fiction, the car scene, with the unscripted dialogue and the long takes and jump cuts seen in new wave film.
Overall I'm not very pleased with my Film I believe the footage I shot could have been better and the narrative structure could have been better, as well as having more examples of typical new wave ideologies and techniques.

Contextual Studies - American new wave essay

‘’American new wave films ignored taboos and appealed to the youth, addressing sex and violence with now iconic moments in cinema history.’’ (Saporito, 2016) This new brand of filmmaking was bewitching audiences and generations of eventual filmmakers. These films were centred on complex themes with morally ambiguous messages, reflecting the nonconforming generation disillusioned by Vietnam and the Vietnam war, which changed American film into a means of looking critically at the country's history and future.

In his book, Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema, Film studies professor and author Todd Berliner syas that five principles govern the narrative of the New Hollywood movement:
· ‘’A tendency to integrate, story and stylistic devices;
· Situate their film-making practices in between those of classical Hollywood and European and Asian art cinema;
· prompt spectator responses more uncertain and discomforting than Hollywood cinema;
· irresolution, when Hollywood movies tie up loose ends;
· hinders narrative linearity and momentum to generate suspense and excitement.’’ (Berliner, 2010)

New Hollywood’s run through the 1970s changed cinema forever. Filmmakers continue to be inspired by and draw from the works of the New Hollywood auteurs, such as Scorsese and Coppola.
Looking at what Author Todd Berliner said about the five main principals of American new wave film it is easy to see how they are applied to both the mainstream cinematic films, like The Godfather (Coppola, 1972) and Bonnie and Clyde (Penn, 1967), and smaller more independent films, Like Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969).
In regards to The Godfather (Coppola 1972) it seems like a crime picture or a gangster movie but contains some of the coming of age elements evident in the new wave movement. But it diverts towards the rise of mainstream Hollywood cinema with its high budget and cinematic shots. It focuses on the truth of what is going on at the time with the crime and violence with the mafia. Making people see a different reality rather than that of the Vietnam war. One scene in particular, when we hear about the meeting arranged and follow the plan to conceal a gun in the lavatory of the small, neighbourhood Italian restaurant chosen for the rendezvous. Within that there's the night-time car ride where Michael is frisked and approved during which we see the typical shadows and lowkey lighting effects like chiaroscuro associated with Film noir and new holly wood films as well as the long takes of the dialogue between the characters in the car. The film noir element isn’t a key feature of American new wave however is a feature of the French new wave which gave rise to New Hollywood. As Berliner said ‘’seventies films Situate their film-making practices in between those of classical Hollywood and European and Asian art cinema’’ (Berliner, 2010), taking some elements of French new wave with the film noir style and the tendency towards extreme violence from Asian art cinema. In the restaurant itself, there's Italian talk at the table, with subtitles, and Michael asks to be allowed to go to the bathroom, proving Berliners point of ‘’Seventies films showing a tendency to integrate story and stylistic devices.’’(Berliner,2010) in the background the noise of the rise and fall of a subway train passing is heard in between the dialogue. The train is used an artistic device, a heightening effect. With New wave films dialogue drowned out by noises was used as a sense of verisimilitude to show audiences that they are watching a film that has a sense of reality written within, that and most shots were only filmed once due to a lower budget, The Godfather may have had a larger budget but shots were still usually done in one to save time, in this case the train noise wasn’t drowning out dialogue but added background noise changing the mood of the scene.

Michael comes out with a gun and leaves the two men for dead. Coppola deliberately does not use the more popular approach of sadistic punishment, rejecting the Hitchcockian way of violence and the conventions of classic American cinema noted by Mulvey, she suggested, ‘’ this domination has caused a clear masculine bias in how films are shot and presented to viewers who, sometimes unknowingly, consume examples of harmful masculinity.’’ (Mulvey, 1999)

But something else has happened – Michael, the good boy in the family has crossed over. He has come of age, coming of age films were a large part of 1960's/1970s cinema in Hollywood giving the audience something to connect to. The Godfather suddenly reveals itself as not just a gangster chronicle, but the progress of Michael towards evil. What makes The Godfather new wave is the focus on the true-to-life gloom of Italian American life. The old distinction between good guys and bad guys will not pass in an America suddenly aware of its own corruption and compromise.

On that same note of good, bad and America becoming aware of own corruption we have Easy rider (Hopper 1969), Easy Rider is a record of a certain time in American history, and a chronicle of a culture clash that never quite ended. It’s a freewheeling take on freedom—what it means and what it costs. The word freedom also describes the mind-set that created Easy Rider. The film was shot totally outside of studio channels, for around $350,000, and was cowritten by Hopper, Fonda, and Terry Southern all representing facets of the counter­culture. They were united by their embrace of a bohemian lifestyle and their dissatisfaction with post war America.
Billy and Wyatt cross the United States in two senses of the word: literally as a road trip across America, and in giving offense. They disrupt, oppose, betray. Like so many of the fringe characters the duo meets on their journey, they don’t have regular jobs, families, or homes. They live from one drug deal to the next, go where they please, and stick around until they feel like moving on again. Showing the other sense of the phrase. Billy’s and Wyatt’s appearances challenge prevailing notions of manhood (the bikers are routinely harassed for their long hair and eccentric clothes and mocked as girls or queers).

‘’Hopper treated Easy Rider as a laboratory in which to test his theories of what constituted truly adventurous writing, directing, and acting. And he drove himself and his castmates to give intuitive, risky, confessional performances.’’ (Seitz, 2010)

Hopper’s background as a photographer and art director informed the movie’s loose, inventive visuals. He encouraged his cinematographer to shoot most of the film’s exteriors with natural light. Most daringly, Hopper denied conventions of classical cinema and used long takes of the of the guys riding their bikes for the majority of the film. Easy Rider also transcends its cultural moment, because it’s about more than bikers and hippies or the tension between libertines and reactionaries. It’s about the difficulty of escaping social conditioning and economic imperatives and sustaining a truly free life which is why drugs are shown prominently throughout the film as society in the 60’s/70’s used drugs as a way to escape what was going on.
In the oft-cited campfire scene near the end, Wyatt tells Billy, “We blew it.” That line has been taken as an indictment of the American counterculture, but the line is also seen as more of a personal sort of confession, an admission that they have ultimately succumbed and bought into their own.
In a particular moment of the film Wyatt and Billy are sitting in a graveyard with two girls, drinking, smoking and taking acid, a drug common in the 60's, from what is seen in these two minutes they are having a bad trip. further reading of the film as a whole shows that after this bad trip in the graveyard the two lads go on a journey of spiritual truth, the start of which can be seen and directly related to the underlying religious setting of a graveyard but also the use of a non-diegetic but then diegetic voice over from a girl reading either from a bible or one of the lords prayers. At the start of the clip we get a mid-shot low down looking at the four sat in front of a tombstone on of the lads is dressed as a native American, again foreshadowing the spiritual trip they will take later in the film. The lack of dialogue between the group doesn't help to show anything that is going on other than the words ''just shut up and take it'' the only speech here that conveys anything is the voice over that comes in, throughout the scene there is a loud non-diegetic sound that seems like drums banging or something loud and ominous probably foreshadowing the nature of the trip they are about to take from the actual drugs themselves, ironically before they take a trip across America to find spiritual truth. The shot then jumps between a shot of them and a pan upwards of the tomb as well as a lens flare across the screen possibly showing this idea of spirituality as god is the light, this is also seen with the a shot of the sun then going to a white out to the jump back to their bad trip. However, reviewing what Berliner said, the scene is confusing and does what he says American New Wave films do. “prompt spectator responses more uncertain and discomforting than Hollywood cinema’’. (Berliner 2010)

Bonnie and Clyde (Penn 1967) not only defies the conventions of classical cinema and the traditional gangster films of the 30’s onwards, where film noir was very popular, by doing things differently, not only defying the conventions of cinema but also the views of society, issues of Gender, extreme violence, social hierarchy and Race were all explored. Pfeiffer said the film “pioneered a new era of filmmaking, tearing down barriers in the depiction of violence and sexuality”. (Pfeiffer, 2018). The film defys the norm of gender roles by giving Bonnie Power, as in society and in traditional Gangster cinema men were the ones with the power. But the main thing Bonnie and Clyde stood for just like Easy Rider was Freedom but also the cost of freedom.

“Love is never free. Neither Penn would lead us to believe, is freedom” …” Penn is not creating gangsters that go against the social order – he uses them to make the audience uncomfortable with that order”’ … “Penn allows Bonnie and Clyde to generate themselves as figures of freedom”. (Kolker, 2000)

Take the final scene, where the film descends into a violent and disturbing conclusion. While it had seemed that they might be able to outrun the police forever, the group finds that this is not the case after they are apprehended at the cabin they are staying in. Because the Barrow gang has caused so much chaos in the region, the cops are intent on killing them as soon as they find them. The violent consequences of the gang's actions lead to horrifying images of violence. Penn does not spare the viewer from the sight of blood or any of the grisly violent details.  The fact that they are hunted down and apprehended after their escape shows this lack of freedom and the ideal that both Easy rider and Bonnie and Clyde both have that freedom has a price and we are never truly free from society or the world events.  Linking back to the Extreme violence and Defiance of classical conventions, the final scene heightens the violence with the build up towards it, using long takes, shot reverse shot and a lack of non-diegetic background music. These techniques both heightened the focus on the violence but also made the audience uncomfortable generating a response that was not like that of classical cinema. Again, agreeing with what Berliner said about the narrative of new wave. “prompt spectator responses more uncertain and discomforting than Hollywood cinema”.

Overall, it appears that the common trend throughout the multitude of films is the portrayal of Freedom and changing times. “..rose to prominence in the late 60s, bringing a new set of values representative of the counter-culture and an aesthetic influenced by the French New Wave’’ (Hitchman, 2013). Which with the Vietnam war going on people needed a form of escape from reality. The vast array of films brought to light the significance of freedom, coming of age, good vs evil and the decay of an old world and society and has been renowned as being the start of what we know as Mainstream Hollywood cinema.

Works Cited

Berliner, T. (2010). Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema. Austin: university of texas press.

Coppola, F. F. (Director). (1972). The Godfather [Motion Picture].

Hitchman, S. (2013). A History of American New Wave. Retrieved from New Wave Film: http://www.newwavefilm.com/international/american-new-wave-1.shtml

Hopper, D. (Director). (1969). Easy Rider [Motion Picture].

Kolker, R. (2000). A Cinema of Loneliness. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mulvey, L. (1999). “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York: Oxford University Press.

Penn, A. (Director). (1967). Bonnie and Clyde [Motion Picture].

Pfeiffer, L. (2018, March 15). Bonnie and Clyde. Retrieved from ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bonnie-and-Clyde-film-by-Penn

Saporito, J. (2016, july 14). Q: The Filmmaker’s Handbook: What was the New Hollywood movement? Retrieved from The Take: http://screenprism.com/insights/article/the-filmmakers-handbook-what-is-the-new-hollywood-movement

Seitz, M. Z. (2010, November 24). Easy Rider: Wild at Heart. Retrieved from The Criterion Colection : https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1667-easy-rider-wild-at-heart

Contextual Studies - American new wave essay, evaluation

Once I gathered all of my contextual research on the American new wave, I decided to write a 2000 word essay about three of the most famous new wave films "Bonnie and Clyde", "The Godfather" and "Easy Rider" and how the new wave bought to light freedom, and the price of it and also how the cinema broke conventions of the classical cinema movement that came before.
I originally wanted to do a video essay demonstrating the same point but when writing the script felt like it was too much like an essay so decided to change to an essay, during the writing of the essay I struggled to get some point across originally feeling like I was rambling on about the same point, yet sorted this out in the final thing.
I feel like the structure of my essay pieced together smoothly as it talked about what the American new wave is, why it started and then went on to speak about my three chosen texts. To improve my essay I feel as I could have added more references from a wider range of sources, and analysed the scenes to a higher degree.

Contextual Studies - American new wave short film task

Brief - 

I am tasked with investigating a New Wave of my choice from a recognised era,  critically assessing the key factors surrounding a range of films and assessing the impact of their reception, alongside that I am tasked with creating a short film that is around 2 minuets long, demonstrating the techniques of the new wave I have been assessing, I have chosen American New Wave as my area of study for this assignment.

Planning - 

• Car scene, 
• Pub scene.      all of theses because of ease of accesses the weekend I will be filming will be at 
• Skating.          the last 2 locations and a friend has agreed to use his car.

• Long shots and jump cuts prominent in filming, due to the use of them in new wave film.
• Lack of script due to the objection of the conventions of classical cinema

Techniques of new wave

focus on crime and drugs
real conversations non scripted
jump cuts
punchy dialogue
mistakes
long takes
inspiration - the godfather and pulp fiction
In particular the car scenes

Narrative

my narrative changed over time, originally I was going to do a short clip about 2 guys buying drugs from a crime lord, however now realising the complications of such, with a limited time to film, I changed my idea to a simple 2 minute video of my weekend, done In the style of American New Wave Film.

Test Footage - 

This is some of the test footage I took, using a tripod and camera and adapting the iso settings to get some footage that looks natural, the dialogue in the videos is non scripted and is natural conversation between the subjects of the film,  the shots are a mix of mid and long shots focusing on a subject, and they are all long takes, in editing I will add them together including jump cuts and non diegetic sound in some places to add to the stylism of American New Wave.

Bibliography:

Pulp Fiction scene. Available at: https://youtu.be/LBBni_-tMNs (accessed 7 NOVEMBER 2019)

Contextual studies - Easy rider analysis

Easy Rider is a record of a certain time in American history, and a chronicle of a culture clash that never quite ended. But it’s no mere historical document or cinematic curiosity. It’s a freewheeling take on freedom—what it means and what it costs.


Billy and Wyatt—who goes by the nickname Captain America, and has the star-spangled accessories to earn it—cross the United States in two senses of the word: in traveling from Mexico to Los Angeles, through the Southwest, and on to New Orleans, and in giving offense. They disrupt, oppose, betray. Like so many of the fringe characters the duo meet on their journey, Billy and Wyatt don’t have regular jobs, families, or homes. They live from one drug deal to the next, go where they please, and stick around until they feel like moving on again. This isn’t a philosophical statement on their part; it’s just how they happen to live—and Billy’s initial puzzlement at George’s analysis suggests that he’s never thought of himself as a symbol of anything. But the representatives of America’s dominant culture—the go-along-to-get-along proletariat that then president Richard M. Nixon would describe as the Silent Majority—have been thinking in those terms, and as far as they’re concerned, these moon-child freaks are walking provocations. Billy’s and Wyatt’s appearances challenge prevailing notions of manhood (the bikers are routinely harassed for their long hair and eccentric clothes, and mocked as girls or queers). The born-wild bikers’ nomadic existence proves it’s possible to survive without becoming tranquilized zoo animals.The word freedom also describes the mind-set that created Easy Rider. The film was shot totally outside of studio channels, for around $350,000, and was cowritten by Hopper, Fonda, and novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove, Candy), all representing facets of the counter­culture—a multigenerational catchall term that covered so-called Beats, or beatniks, in the fifties and early sixties and hippies in the late sixties and early seventies. They were united by their embrace of a bohemian lifestyle and their dissatisfaction with postwar America. Fonda came up with the germ of an idea for a modern western keyed to that sensibility and brought in Hopper and Southern as collaborators. Southern, who had been traveling in hipster artist circles since the late 1940s (his friends amounted to a who’s who of midcentury arts and letters—Nelson Algren, Kenneth Tynan, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Henry Green), was the most aesthetically grounded of the trio, and he took the first pass at the script in 1967. (And despite later revisions and on-set improvisations—and Hopper’s attempts to diminish his role—Southern’s influence on the final film can be strongly felt. Visual flights of fancy notwithstanding, Easy Rider is a spare, poetic work, marked by a mix of spiky humor and tenderness that’s characteristic of Southern.) Hopper treated Easy Rider as a laboratory in which to test his theories of what constituted truly adventurous writing, directing, and acting. And he drove himself and his castmates to give intuitive, risky, confessional performances. (For the New Orleans sequence with Karen Black and Toni Basil, Hopper persuaded Fonda to talk to a statue of a woman in a cemetery as if it were his mother. “Oh God, how l loved you,” Wyatt sobs.) Hopper’s background as a photographer and art director informed the movie’s loose, inventive visuals. He encouraged his cinematographer, László Kovács—a survivor of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, who adored the American landscape—to shoot most of the film’s exteriors with natural light. (Kovács’s highly expressive on-the-fly photography is a tour de force in the possibilities of the zoom lens, and an incalculable number of subsequent movies have tried to ape Easy Rider’s visuals.) Most daringly, Hopper eschewed straightforward plotting and instead devoted long stretches of the film’s running time to footage of the guys riding their bikes, while cities and towns and mountains and trees roll past them in a continuous geographic slipstream. He told his crew that he wanted the film to be a mind-blowing visceral experience, like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out a few weeks before Easy Rider began production. Easy Rider also transcends its cultural moment, because it’s about more than bikers and hippies or the tension between libertines and reactionaries. It’s about the difficulty of escaping social conditioning and economic imperatives and sustaining a truly free life. In the oft-cited campfire scene near the end, Wyatt tells Billy, “We blew it.” That line has been taken as an indictment of the American counterculture, which, like so many protean revolutionary movements, started self-destructing once it gained enough power and prominence to effect real change. One can read it that way. But the line strikes me also as a more personal sort of confession, an admission that they have ultimately succumbed and bought into their own outlaw version of the capitalist rat race—the idea that a man is not a true success unless he has accumulated enough money to stop working and take it easy.

Contextual studies - Bonnie and Clyde analysis

Bonnie and Clyde – The French New Wave in Hollywood

Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) was the start of the Hollywood Renaissance Movement – one that is filled with previously taboo topics that cinema tried to stay away from. The initial release was lukewarm and it was only though Pauline Kael’s lengthy essay, that praised the film, allowed the film a second chance. The graphic violence and sexual nature of Bonnie and Clyde’s relationship excited the American public, who thought of the real duo as noble populists. Penn did not shy away from the gritty and dirty lives of the criminals and that cemented Bonnie and Clyde within global iconic film status. The film reused techniques of the French New Wave, to draw the younger generation of moviegoers back to the cinema.

The film is based on the real-life Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, criminals in American West during the Great Depression. The film scandalised the conservatives, starting with a nude scene of Faye Dunaway who plays the titular character of Bonnie and ending with the graphic rampage of their death. The film showed blood and gore explicitly and the audiences enjoyed each violent scene. However, despite such strides in portraying the lives of violent criminals realistically, the film uses the subtleties of the French New Wave liberally and the connection between the two movements are palpable.

Warren Beatty who plays Clyde, also acted as the producer of the film, and had originally approached French New Wave directors to make the film. So, the influence of the French New Wave had begun at the very conception of the show and would go on to influence Penn’s version of the pseudo-autobiography. The tone of Bonnie and Clyde utilised French New Wave techniques of characterisation of the protagonists, fast cuts, and spontaneous music to shift tone abruptly.

Bonnie and Clyde echoed one of the most well-known French New Wave movies, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). We see similarities in the protagonist Michel and Clyde, anti-heroes who were arrogant, rebellious and believed themselves to be above the law. Both characters have a hyper masculine and sexual façade, Clyde putting on the mask of a Western outlaw and Michel as the classic Hollywood gangster. Their downfall is the very thing that makes them so attractive, their brutality and confidence that serves to attract characters and audiences alike. The audience grows to root for these morally repugnant characters even though they know that these crimes cannot go unpunished and their eventual deaths are not celebrated by the audience.

The camera techniques in Bonnie and Clyde are also distinctively like the New Wave movement. A scene that shows this perfectly is the ending scene where Bonnie and Clyde are viciously gunned down. The abrupt change in tone occurs when Mr Moss suddenly ducks for cover, the characters go from carefree with long takes to an abrupt burst of short and fast cuts. The change of tone is particularly jarring as within that few minutes of the scene the audience go from feeling carefree to free. The film does not even allow the audience to process their emotions as the characters are shot at in a long slow motion that seems almost beautiful in its choreography. The loud gunshots start of jarring but becomes almost like background music as the characters fall in slow motion with blood spewing out from wounds. Their deaths becomes a performance despite the horrific, almost cruel, killing.

Lastly, Bonnie and Clyde uses banjo music to convey a change in tone in the film. In scenes where the characters are robbing banks, the sombre and serious tone of the robbery itself is quickly switched to a fun and spritely one through the sudden quick strum of banjo music during the duo’s getaway. The song, Earl Sruggs’ “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” becomes emblematic and undercuts the seriousness of the show. It is comedic in nature and such a song paired with car chases immediately after a stick up allowed Penn to shift the film’s tone precipitously.
Hence, Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde is hallmarked for triggering a whole new set of Hollywood films that were unabashedly violent and sexual. It opened the cinema up for the wider audience and revived a dying industry by bringing New Wave techniques directly into the Hollywood studios.


Bibliography:

Narelle (2017), Bonnie and Clyde – The French New Wave in Hollywood.
Available at : https://oss.adm.ntu.edu.sg/narelle001/bonnie-and-clyde-the-french-new-wave-in-hollywood/ (accessed 13th November 2019)

Images in order

1 - found at: http://crimefeed.com/2017/01/serial-killer-cinema-10-movies-based-bonnie-clyde/ (accessed: 13th November 2019)

2 - found at: https://journeysindarknessandlight.wordpress.com/2015/06/28/growing-up-with-movies-introduction-and-episode-1-bonnie-and-clyde-1967/ (Accessed 13th November 2019)

3 - found at: https://www.express.co.uk/pictures/pics/4230/Faye-Dunaway-60s-American-actress-pictures/Faye-Dunaway-and-Warren-Beatty-star-together-in-the-1967-film-Bonnie-and-Clyde-95600 (accessed 13th November 2019)

4 - found at: http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2017/8/16/bonnie-clydes-50th-anniversary.html (accessed 13th November 2019)

Contextual studies - Godfather analysis

At first sight, The Godfather seems like a crime picture or a gangster movie. And we should remember that in its day it was the most successful film there had ever been, as well as winner of the Oscar for best picture. So it seems like a triumph of the mainstream.

However with The Godfather containing elements of American new wave it is a great example of a film that takes it's place in American new wave cinema but diverts towards the rise of mainstream Hollywood cinema. its focuses on the truth of what is going on at the time focusing on the crime and violence with the mafia. Making people see a different reality rather than the reality of the Vietnam war.

The scene in particular, is a brilliantly sustained exercise in suspense in which we hear about the meeting arranged and follow the plan to conceal a gun in the lavatory of the small, neighbourhood Italian restaurant chosen for the rendezvous. We wonder, will it work? So there's the night-time car ride where Michael is frisked and approved. There are the ominous chords of Nino Rota's score building. And there is the restaurant itself, a quiet but welcoming place – "Try the veal", says Sollozzo. There's Italian talk at the table, with subtitles, and then Michael asks to be allowed to go to the bathroom. It figures. He should be very nervous.
Then you hear the noise. It's the rise and fall of a subway train passing. Through the restaurant? No. But did you ever hear of a successful restaurant, even one with great veal, where every passing train drowns out conversation? Of course not. The train is an artistic device, a heightening effect, a vibrato supplied by the great sound designer Walter Murch. With New wave films dialogue  drowned out by noises was used as a sense of verisimilitude to show audiences that they are watching a film that has a sense of reality written within, that and most shots were only filmed once due to a lower budget, The Godfather may have had a larger budget but shots were still usually done in one to save time and create a sense of verisimilitude.

The coup works. Michael comes out with a gun and leaves the two men for dead. He walks out of the restaurant and remembers his instructions – drop the gun. The music rises in triumph. Game, set and match to the Corleones. But something else has happened – Michael, the good boy in the family, the Ivy League student with a glowing military record, the son Vito was hoping to save, has crossed over. He has come of age – he is a made man. Coming of age films were a large part of 1960's/1970s cinema in Hollywood giving the audience something to connect to. The Godfather suddenly reveals itself as not just a gangster chronicle, or even a series of magnificent set pieces, but the progress of Michael towards evil. And evil is a subject for art.

With that thought we begin to appreciate the cumulative artistry of the film – not just Murch's plans with sound, or Rota's operatic music, nor even the overwhelming period authenticity of the production design by Dean Tavoularis, but hanging over everything, the Rembrandt browns in the photography by Gordon Willis. What makes The Godfather so ambitious is that atmosphere in which the true-to-life gloom of Italian-American interiors takes on a moral force.

The influence of The Godfather is unequalled. Not just in the new vogue for gangster and mafia pictures, but in the stress on family and the unsentimental attraction to darkness and evil, and in the career of Francis Ford Coppola as a model new director. The American movie comes of age in 1972. The old distinction between good guys and bad guys will not pass in an America suddenly aware of its own corruption and compromise. (This is the time of Watergate.) Finally, a pregnant confusion has set in: what is the mainstream and what is art? Michael Corleone is our modern Charles Foster Kane, and every bit as tricky.

Contextual Studies - My Choice of American new wave films.

American new wave films i'm going to study and look at.




Bonnie and Clyde






Bonnie and Clyde is a 1967 American neo-noir biographical crime film directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the title characters Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Also featured were Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman, and Estelle Parsons.


Easy Rider






Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper), two Harley-riding hippies, complete a drug deal in Southern California and decide to travel cross-country in search of spiritual truth. On their journey, they experience bigotry and hatred from the inhabitants of small-town America and also meet with other travelers seeking alternative lifestyles. After a terrifying drug experience in New Orleans, the two travelers wonder if they will ever find a way to live peacefully in America.


The Godfather



Widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time, this mob drama, based on Mario Puzo's novel of the same name, focuses on the powerful Italian-American crime family of Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando). When the don's youngest son, Michael (Al Pacino), reluctantly joins the Mafia, he becomes involved in the inevitable cycle of violence and betrayal. Although Michael tries to maintain a normal relationship with his wife, Kay (Diane Keaton), he is drawn deeper into the family business.

Contextual Studies - What is American New Wave?

New Hollywood was a movement in filmmaking from the late 1960s through the 1970s. The movement started with The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, both released in 1967, and continued through the 1970s as auteurs crafted films that would influence the future of movie-making. These films saw less influence from their production studios and more influence from their directors, allowing new brands of creative authorship that broke away from people's existing expectations of what Hollywood films could be. Representing a productive union between studio and director in which the director takes creative control of the film, New Hollywood resulted in commercially viable pictures that explored previously taboo subjects in innovative new ways.

New Hollywood isn’t so much a style of filmmaking as it is a movement and a period of time. It refers to a post-Hays liberation of creativity ushered in by a generation of young filmmakers who took the primary authorial role away from studios and into their own hands. Their style, production process and storytelling approach opposed what people expected of Hollywood films prior to this point. No longer were studio films produced solely for commercial gain; instead, the studio system worked in conjunction with viewing film as an art and reviving creativity of expression. Autheur filmmakers explored unconventional storytelling techniques, examined risky subjects and did it in style, on Hollywood's dime.


Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde
Televisions started appearing in homes in the 1950s, disrupting the comfortable Hollywood status quo. By the 1960s, attitudes were shifting and commercial success was down as the “Golden Age” of Hollywood became a distant memory. The big-budget studio productions were failing to draw crowds, and some of the most expensive films ever made were flops that shoved studio funds down the tubes. With the Production Code disbanded and studios scrambling for something new, clever young filmmakers saw an opportunity to create lower-budget, uniquely engaging films. New waves of cinema coming from Europe and Japan were making their way through American film schools, as the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman became all the rage among American cinephiles. From this cinephilia, New Hollywood was born.

The first films generally attributed to the New Hollywood movement are Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Mike Nichols’ The Graduate(1967). These films ignored taboos and appealed to the youth, addressing sex and violence with now iconic moments in motion picture history. While Mrs. Robinson was trying to seduce a young Dustin Hoffman with that legendary under-the-leg shot, this new brand of filmmaking was bewitching audiences and generations of eventual filmmakers. These films were centered on complex themes with morally ambiguous messages, reflecting the nonconforming generation disillusioned by Vietnam, upset with the elite and rich with contemplation, which re-tooled American film into a means of looking critically at the country's history and future.


Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate

Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty first collaborated on Mickey One in 1965. After Bonnie and Clyde was passed from Francois Truffaut to Godard to Warren Beatty and finally to Penn, the latter was originally reluctant to take the directorial chair. But it didn’t take long before he realizedBonnie and Clyde isn’t just another gangster picture but a searing social commentary on violence and hypocrisy in America in the 1960s. It is a period crime story with a contemporary lesson.

While the studio, Warner Brothers, was still blind to the untapped potential of what would be the New Hollywood movement, they gave Penn and Beatty free reign to fill the film’s cast with unknown stage actors like Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons and to shoot the film in Texas. When the film was complete, the studio and its executives hated it, as did middle-brow film critics at a number of national papers. Only Pauline Kael of The New Yorker praised the film (she would go on to offer the same congratulations to The Graduate). Then Bonnie and Clyde did well in Europe, and it was Time's cover story and “best movie of the year.” When Warner Brothers re-released the film in America, it became one of the biggest money-makers of the era and was nominated for ten Academy Awards. The possibilities afforded by this elevated, disaffected, auteur-driven filmmaking became clear.

As the culture of American cinema widened after Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, many European directors came to join the movement so that they could couple their artistic desires with Hollywood budgets. Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick, Milos Foreman and John Boorman all crafted some of their best work within the wave of New Hollywood’s current. Their films boasted an outsider approach that spoke to New Hollywood’s nature of exploring and exposing American morality with a fresh eye.

Film studies professor and author Todd Berliner believes five principles govern the narrative strategies characteristic of Hollywood films of the New Hollywood movement:

• Seventies films show a perverse tendency to integrate, in narratively incidental ways, story information and stylistic devices counterproductive to the films’ overt and essential narrative purposes.
• Hollywood filmmakers of the 1970s often situate their film-making practices in between those of classical Hollywood and those of European and Asian art cinema.
• Seventies films prompt spectator responses more uncertain and discomforting than those of more typical Hollywood cinema.
• Seventies narratives place an uncommon emphasis on irresolution, particularly at the moment of climax or in epilogues, when more conventional Hollywood movies busy themselves tying up loose ends.
• Seventies cinema hinders narrative linearity and momentum and scuttles its potential to generate suspense and excitement.

Many legendary films are considered part of the movement, including 

Easy Rider (1969)

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

Badlands (1973)

American Graffiti (1973)

The Dirty Dozen (1967)

MASH(1970)

Catch-22 (1970)

Don't Look Back (1967)

The Godfather (1972)

Apocalypse Now (1979)

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

Chinatown(1974)

The Sting (1973), 

Barry Lyndon (1975)

The New Hollywood era lasted until around 1980, when big-budget Hollywood pictures began to re-dominate the market. It is challenging to put an “end” point on a movement. Perhaps it is Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart (1982), or perhaps Warren Beatty both opened and closed the movement with Reds (1981), the epic drama in which he directed, starred, produced and wrote. Regardless of which picture closed the books on New Hollywood, the movement's run through the 1970s altered the landscape of cinema forever. Filmmakers continue to be inspired by and draw from the works of the New Hollywood auteurs, who produced many of the art form's most revered works.

A New Hollywood

In the late 1960s and early 70s, a new generation of young filmmakers came to prominence in American cinema. Their work was thematically complex, formally innovative, morally ambiguous, anti-establishment, and rich in mythic resonance. They spoke for a generation disillusioned by the Vietnam War, disenchanted by the ruling elite, and less willing to conform than their parents.
Dubbed the "New Hollywood" by the press, their films were mostly financed by the major studios, but they introduced subject matter and a new stylistic approach that set them apart from studio tradition. Influenced by the revolutionary new waves of cinema coming out of Europe, they re-worked, and re-imagined, some of Hollywood’s classic genres – such as the crime film, the war film, and the western – and by doing so, presented a more critical view of America, past and present.
In front of the camera, a brilliant new generation of actors and actresses, often trained in acting schools in New York, brought a new level of realism and intensity to the screen. While behind the scenes – writers, cinematographers, editors, composers, and other creative figures – changed the way American movies looked and sounded.
Although the new generation’s ambition to overturn the system and create something better in its place may have ultimately failed, they did succeed in producing a body of work now considered a golden age in American cinema.

Bibliography :
Hitchman.S (2013) New Hollywood: American new wave cinema. Available at : http://www.newwavefilm.com/international/new-hollywood.shtml (accessed 1 October 2019)
Saporito.J (2016) Filmmaker's Handbook: What is the New Hollywood movement. Available at: http://screenprism.com/insights/article/the-filmmakers-handbook-what-is-the-new-hollywood-movement (accessed 1 October 2019)
Images available at: http://screenprism.com/insights/article/the-filmmakers-handbook-what-is-the-new-hollywood-movement (accessed 1 October 2019)

Contextual Studies - EASY RIDER analysis

In this particular moment of the film Wyatt and Billy are sitting in a graveyard with two girls, drinking, smoking and taking acid, a drug common in the 60's, from what is seen in these two minutes they are having a bad trip. further reading of the film as a whole shows that after this bad trip in the graveyard the two lads go on a journey of spiritual truth, the start of which can be seen and directly related to the underlying religious setting of a graveyard but also the use of a non-diegetic but then digetic voice over from a girl reading either from a bible or one of the lords prayers. at the start of the clip we get a mid shot low down looking at the four sat in front of a tombstone on of the lads is dressed as a native american, again pointing the the spiritual trip they will take later in the film. the lack of dialogue between the group doesn't help to show anything that is going on other than the words ''just shut up and take it'' the only speech here that conveys anything is the voice over that comes in a minute into the clip, throughout the scene there is a loud non-diegetic sound that seems like drums banging or something loud and ominous probably foreshadowing the nature of the trip they are about top take from the actual drugs themselves, ironically before they take a trip across america to find spiritual truth. the shot then jumps between a shot of them and a pan upwards of the tomb as well as a lens flare across the screen possibly showing this idea of spirituality as god is the light, this is also seen with the a shot of the sun then going to a white out to the jump back to their bad trip.

Even with the lack of dialogue you can tell what is happening in this moment and is conveyed through shots weather it gives a preferred reading is debatable, I would say that personally I took a negotiated reading to the text as without actively watching it i struggled to understand the ongoing of the clip.

''Cinema in the 1960s reflected the decade of fun, fashion, rock 'n' roll, tremendous social changes (i.e., the civil rights era and marches) and transitional cultural values.''

This can be seen with the drugs mainly as acid was a very popular drug in the 60's/70's however the camerawork is also reflective of the era as the cameras then were still on the bulky side and were not as handheld as cameras today, also reflection the changing times of the era.

Bibliography
Clip available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDAdzb9IeGU (Accessed 6th September 2019)