Scottish Modernism Goes to New Hollywood: Tracing the Script Development of Alan Sharp’s Night Moves

Author(s):  
River Seager
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Eugenio Ercolani ◽  
Marcus Stiglegger

When William Friedkin’s psycho thriller Cruising was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival and hit cinemas worldwide in 1980 it was mainly misunderstood: the upcoming gay scene dismissed it as an offence to their efforts to open up to society and a distorted image of homosexuality, prompting the distributors to add a disclaimer that preceded the picture: Genre audiences were confused about the idea of a sexualized cop thriller with procedural drama that frequently turns into a horror film with the identity of the killer changing with each murder. Seen from today’s perspective, Friedkin’s film turned out to be an enduring cult classic documenting the gay leather scene of the late 1970s as well as providing a stunning image of identity crisis and an examination of male sexuality in general. In the fading years of the New Hollywood era (1967–1976), William Friedkin—the ‘New Hollywood Wunderkind’, with an Academy Award for his cop drama, The French Connection (1971), and following the tremendous success of his horror film, The Exorcist (1973)—proves once more the strength of his unique approach in combining genre and auteur cinema to create a fascinating film that turns 40 in 2020. This book dives into the phenomenon that is Cruising: it examines its creative context and its protagonists, as well as explaining its ongoing popularity.


Author(s):  
Barry Mazor

This chapter presents an overview of available writing and research materials within country music history and cinema studies disciplines on the interaction of commercial country music and theatrical motion pictures—how the music and its practitioners have been represented on-screen and reception of both have been affected by that representation, and how the music has contributed to films. The deficit in systematic resources for study is described—the lack of country music film archives, filmographies of related motion pictures, and dedicated catalogues. Literature (or its absence) engaging country music and the screen as they evolved and related in the silent, prewar sound, postwar country music boom, and post-1970 “New Hollywood” periods is outlined. How country music performances have served narratives and as self-contained cinematic elements are differentiated, and film’s continuing use as an agency for shaping country’s cultural respectability is outlined.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-144
Author(s):  
Gegen

History was always written by the winners. Despite the fact that the history of the War on Terror is relatively new, Hollywood is quick to develop a visual history of the conflict. Hollywood’s excellent realism aesthetics were successful in justifying the goal and method of the “war on terror,” interrupting ongoing reality to influence and reconstruct public memory about what happened. This dissertation will use three awarded and influential case studies: The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper to demonstrate the fragmentation of film representation, that the film only speaks for “us.” The dissertation aims to uncover the hidden political unawareness behind film representations, the manner in which those films provide limited versions of what happened, and how the films emphasise the self-subjectivity while objectifying the other.


Author(s):  
Julie Hubbert

Terrence Malick’s Badlands has long been appreciated as an important contribution to New Hollywood filmmaking. Its disaffected characters and unconventional narrative structure challenged classical studio filmmaking paradigms and quickly garnered Malick a reputation as a countercultural or auteur filmmaker. For all the scholarship that this film has generated, however, comparatively very little has been said about the film’s equally transgressive soundtrack. Malick engaged the services of a composer but severely limited his duties, choosing instead to score most of the film himself with pre-existing recordings. Where nostalgic films from the period like American Graffiti and The Last Picture Show used compilations of rock and popular, Malick used a strikingly eclectic compilation of pop and classical music, from Nat King Cole to Carl Orff and Erik Satie. Although this range of styles is at odds with the 1950s world of the film, the soundtrack closely reflects the radical changes happening to listening practices among counterculture youth in the late 1960s.


The “New Hollywood” that emerged in the late sixties is now widely recognized as an era of remarkable filmmaking, when directors enjoyed a unique autonomy to craft ambitious, introspective movies that evinced a cinematic world of hard choices, complex interpersonal relationships, compromised heroes, and uncertain outcomes. The New Hollywood Revisited brings together a remarkable collection of authors (some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood as it unfolded), to revisit this unique era in American cinema (circa 1967-1976). It was a decade in which a number of extraordinary factors – including the end of a half-century-old censorship regime and economic and demographic changes to the American film audience – converged and created a new type of commercial film, imprinted with the social and political context of the times: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, economic distress, urban decay, and, looming, the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon presidency. This volume offers the opportunity to look back, with nearly fifty years hindsight, at a golden age in American filmmaking.


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