American cinema has undergone a series of profound transitions since 1976. In many histories of American film, 1976 marks the end of one New Hollywood—the so-called “Hollywood Renaissance” of art cinema-inspired, personal filmmaking driven by young auteurs—and the start of another New Hollywood, this one more oriented toward blockbuster films that, many critics argue, eschew classical principles of narration in order to foreground special effects sequences and to provide opportunities for merchandizing and other product tie-ins. Whether or not one agrees with this characterization of what these critics call “postclassical” film style, it is indisputable that Hollywood’s corporate and industrial structures in this period treat the domestic theatrical release of a narrative feature film as just one moment in the cultural and economic life of a given “property.” Significant developments in exhibition technologies—cable television, home video, and the Internet—created multiple windows of release for a particular film, not to mention the increasingly important foreign markets. Meanwhile, the return of vertical integration by the incorporation of US film studios into multinational corporate parent companies enabled the monetizing of different film-related properties across multiple markets and media streams, thus dispersing our understanding of what constitutes the film “text.” These changes in industrial practice took place during larger shifts in the United States’ position on the world stage, as the Cold War’s end scrambled one set of geopolitical coordinates while the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing wars generated another. American cinema registered these shifts in a number of ways, both in its depiction of political and military conflicts—many of which rerouted contemporary issues through earlier moments in US history (especially the Vietnam War)—and through its reimagination of gender identity, particularly the various forms of masculinity that critics have aligned with the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush eras. Other changes in race, gender, and sexual identity in American life often found their most provocative expression in the rise of a new “independent” American film movement. Critics have explored whether this movement has generated genuinely alternative forms of film narration and aesthetics, as well as whether their “independence” from major studios is better understood as a partial or qualified one. This article outlines the various critical resources that address these developments, as well as related questions, such as the relationship of American cinema to postmodernism and the shifts in film genre that attended the aforementioned developments.
Models of New Femininity and Masculinity in Soviet Russia in the 1920s
