scholarly journals A Road Less Travelled: The American Biker Film of the 1960s and 1970s

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
William Liell Carter

<p>In the period 1966-1974 there were at least forty independent, low-budget feature films made in the United States about motorcycle gangs. These films were inspired by media coverage of the notorious exploits of actual gangs in the post-War period. They depict bikers as violent libertines who live non-conformist lives and engage frequently in anti-social behaviour. The films are marked by motorcycle 'runs,' wild parties, brawls, and sexual violence. While the biker film has received some critical attention, it has not been analysed to the same extent as that more reputable and better known genre of the same period, the road movie. This thesis will expand on existing research by initially examining the factors that shaped the biker film, such as the media panic about real gangs, the influence of the counterculture, exploitation filmmaking, and New Hollywood cinema. The project will also investigate the narrative features of the genre, and link this analysis to debates around post-classical narration. Finally, the thesis will interpret the representation of gender in the biker film. This thesis will argue that the biker film should be situated within a continuum of male-oriented genres that involve violent spectacle. It will also make a contribution to the ongoing research on New Hollywood cinema.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
William Liell Carter

<p>In the period 1966-1974 there were at least forty independent, low-budget feature films made in the United States about motorcycle gangs. These films were inspired by media coverage of the notorious exploits of actual gangs in the post-War period. They depict bikers as violent libertines who live non-conformist lives and engage frequently in anti-social behaviour. The films are marked by motorcycle 'runs,' wild parties, brawls, and sexual violence. While the biker film has received some critical attention, it has not been analysed to the same extent as that more reputable and better known genre of the same period, the road movie. This thesis will expand on existing research by initially examining the factors that shaped the biker film, such as the media panic about real gangs, the influence of the counterculture, exploitation filmmaking, and New Hollywood cinema. The project will also investigate the narrative features of the genre, and link this analysis to debates around post-classical narration. Finally, the thesis will interpret the representation of gender in the biker film. This thesis will argue that the biker film should be situated within a continuum of male-oriented genres that involve violent spectacle. It will also make a contribution to the ongoing research on New Hollywood cinema.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 556-563
Author(s):  
JAY GARCIA

Recalling his work as cofounder and contributor toUniversities and Left Review, or the ULR group, in the lead-up to the founding of cultural studies during the 1950s, Stuart Hall noted that much of that work had to do with the United States. “In geopolitical terms we were of course neutralists, hostile to the politics emanating from the State Department in Washington,” Hall wrote, “but culturally we were nonetheless attracted by the vitality of American popular life, indeed to the domain of mass culture itself.” If the ULR group and similar collectives shared an “anxiety about the stupendous power of the booming consumer capitalism of post-war America,” they were also united by an appreciation for the ways the “vitality and raucousness of American culture certainly loosened England's tight-lipped, hierarchical class cultures and carried inside it possibilities – or the collective dream? – for a better future, which we felt was a serious political loss to deny.” Not unrelatedly, by the 1960s and 1970s, cultural studies and certain quarters of American intellectual life were proceeding along comparable tracks. Many American scholars and at least some working in cultural studies moved toward social history that emphasized the “hidden experiences of subordinated groups and classes.” Undertaken in concert with the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this version of social history would ramify widely, furnishing the very questions and analytic habits of many fields, not least American studies.


2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 506-526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Prestholdt

AbstractThis article explores the symbolic appeal of Che Guevara within radical Left circles of the 1960s and 1970s. Che's importance as a shared political reference offers a unique window on aspirational symbols and the desire for meaningful transnational solidarity. By tracing Che's resonance in Latin America, western Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, the article brings into conversation the study of post-war radicalism, political iconography, and the cognitive dimensions of interconnectivity. As a means of understanding Che's appeal to both protest movements and guerrilla organizations, the article develops the notion of a ‘transnational imagination’, or mode of perception that frames local circumstances in a world historical trajectory and thereby affects collective aspirations and actions.


Author(s):  
Aled Davies

The aim of this book has been to evaluate the relationship between Britain’s financial sector, based in the City of London, and the social democratic economic strategy of post-war Britain. The central argument presented in the book was that changes to the City during the 1960s and 1970s undermined a number of the key post-war social democratic techniques designed to sustain and develop a modern industrial economy. Financial institutionalization weakened the state’s ability to influence investment, and the labour movement was unable successfully to integrate the institutionalized funds within a renewed social democratic economic agenda. The post-war settlement in banking came under strain in the 1960s as new banking and credit institutions developed that the state struggled to manage. This was exacerbated by the decision to introduce competition among the clearing banks in 1971, which further weakened the state’s capacity to control the provision and allocation of credit to the real economy. The resurrection of an unregulated global capital market, centred on London, overwhelmed the capacity of the state to pursue domestic-focused macroeconomic policies—a problem worsened by the concurrent collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system. Against this background, the fundamental social democratic assumption that national prosperity could be achieved only through industry-led growth and modernization was undermined by an effective campaign to reconceptualize Britain as a fundamentally financial and commercial nation with the City of London at its heart....


Author(s):  
Aled Davies

This chapter concerns the politics of managing the domestic banking system in post-war Britain. It examines the pressures brought to bear on the post-war settlement in banking during the 1960s and 1970s—in particular, the growth of new credit creating institutions and the political demand for more competition between banks. This undermined the social democratic model for managing credit established since the war. The chapter focuses in particular on how the Labour Party attempted in the 1970s to produce a banking system that was competitive, efficient, and able to channel credit to the struggling industrial economy.


Daedalus ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 141 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100
Author(s):  
Linda K. Kerber

The old law of domestic relations and the system known as coverture have shaped marriage practices in the United States and have limited women's membership in the constitutional community. This system of law predates the Revolution, but it lingers in U.S. legal tradition even today. After describing coverture and the old law of domestic relations, this essay considers how the received narrative of women's place in U.S. history often obscures the story of women's and men's efforts to overthrow this oppressive regime, and also the story of the continuing efforts of men and some women to stabilize and protect it. The essay also questions the paradoxes built into American law: for example, how do we reconcile the strictures of coverture with the founders' care in defining rights-holders as “persons” rather than “men”? Citing a number of court cases from the early days of the republic to the present, the essay describes the 1960s and 1970s shift in legal interpretation of women's rights and obligations. However, recent developments – in abortion laws, for example – invite inquiry as to how full the change is that we have accomplished. The history of coverture and the way it affects legal, political, and cultural practice today is another American narrative that needs to be better understood.


Author(s):  
Angela de Castro Gomes

The first decades of the 21st century brought back to the international arena a family of terms well known in Latin America to designate both styles of politics and the leaders who embodied them: populism and populists. Brazil is seen as a paradigmatic example of this type of experience, called “classic populism,” for two periods of its history, corresponding to its process of transition from a “traditional” society to a “modern” economy and society. The first period ran from the 1930 revolution until 1945, with the fall of the Estado Novo and the removal of its “leader,” Getúlio Vargas. The latter period covered the 1950s, “the golden years of populism,” since, despite the socioeconomic development achieved, democracy did not manage to establish itself in the country. The populist interpretation of this period of Brazilian history was formulated and shared by academia, essentially after the 1964 coup, and was dominant in the 1960s and 1970s. However, it extended these frontiers, using the language of the media, political conflicts, and the common sense of Brazilians. Widely used, the concepts of populism and populist were conflated with the events and characters they name, only being critiqued in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, the number of scholars seeking other references has grown, whether redrafting the meanings of the original proposal, the case of the “populist political system,” or abandoning it completely, in the example of the “trabalhista pact.” In this dense debate, one constant can be observed: in Brazil populism became a “category of accusation,” translating negative values present in the “other” to whom one is referring. Although many academic studies do not use this pejorative tone, it is so consolidated in Brazilian politics that it has become part of the political culture of parties and trade unions, circulating widely.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-160
Author(s):  
Alexey V. Antoshin ◽  
Dmitry L. Strovsky

The article analyzes the features of Soviet emigration and repatriation in the second half of the 1960s through the early 1970s, when for the first time after a long period of time, and as a result of political agreements between the USSR and the USA, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews were able to leave the Soviet Union for good and settle in the United States and Israel. Our attention is focused not only on the history of this issue and the overall political situation of that time, but mainly on the peculiarities of this issue coverage by the leading American printed media. The reference to the media as the main empirical source of this study allows not only perceiving the topic of emigration and repatriation in more detail, but also seeing the regularities of the political ‘face’ of the American press of that time. This study enables us to expand the usual framework of knowledge of emigration against the background of its historical and cultural development in the 20th century.


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