The Movies Come Back I-Revisionist Genres

• The movie industry rebounded in the 1970’s after the post World War II decline 
• Burst of creativity in American movies in the late 1960’s led to the economic rebirth of the movies 
• People, which included older adults that stopped going to the movies due to the baby boom and younger audiences, started going to movies again, to see films that were not shown on television, and spoke to the issues that concerned them 
• This period also coincided with: 
• The Civil Rights Movement (set the way for the transformation of the representation of African Americas in the movies)
   
• Women’s Movement 
• Native Rights Movement 
•  Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement 
• Green Movement

• In the 1960’s, the vibrant youth culture flourished and was one of the inspirations of the national peace movement in response to the Vietnam war 
• The transformation of Hollywood’s genre system was the result of Hollywood turning it’s attention to the youth culture and changing the way it told stories to remain relevant to the audience 
• For example, filmmakers attempted to speak to the concerns of people questioning political, business and military leaders’ honesty. This broke social conventions of society that the genre system created, and led to a crisis within that system
  
   Generic Crisis
   
• Definition: When a society enters periods of social upheaval, flux and change, generic conventions tend to fall apart; they can no longer perform their conservative function of rationalizing the status quo and providing comfort in
• Through the 1960’s and 1970’s, genre films became different from their predecessors in several ways:
  
  
  •  Crime films: main heroes become counterculture, going up against the government. The criminals are bad and police are good dichotomy is reversed. The criminals are seen in a positive light, and even If they are taken down by the law at the end of the movie, the audience learns to sympathize with them.
  • Examples are Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
  • Film Noir: now part of a consciously constructed genre, “neo noir”, which are crime films with film noir elements, which is the depiction of a corrupt and unredeemable society.
  • Examples are Point Blank (1967), Chinatown (1974) and Night Moves (1975)
  •  The Hollywood Musical: in the 1970’s, this utopian genre was challenged by musicals like Cabaret (1972) and New York New York (1977), which portrayed a darker, and more pessimistic point of view.
  •  Generic Hybrid-The Conspiracy Film
  •  In the 1970’s, the traditional detective story (a loner or outsider, usually an ex-cop who could not stand the corruption within the force, who used his street smarts and intuition to get the job done) was combined with the political thriller to create the conspiracy film. 
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• The conspiracy film does not work to reaffirm American Institutions and individual heroism, unlike the two genres that it is made up from 
• In these films, the search for the truth in an increasingly complex and byzantine world becomes next to impossible 
• Example: The Parallax View (1974), an investigative reporter, Joe Frady, who wants to uncover the people responsible for the assassination of a prominent politician. However, he finds out that the Parallax Corporation has been carrying out assassinations for hire, so he goes undercover as an employee. It ends with Frady being murdered and his implication in the murder of a second politician. He becomes a patsy, like many believed J.F.K’s assassin was.
• This film appeared at a time there were many events leading to the mistrust of government and business
  
  Frederic Jameson attempts to map the changes of film within the last 25 years, and to make connections of these changes to the changes of structures of global capitalism in its present form in his book The Geo-Political Aesthetic. His conclusions are:
• Because of the triumph of the collective values of modern capitalism over old style American individualism, the generic and formal structures of film narrative can no longer contain the traditional styles of storytelling, which results in the crisis of the hero figure. 
• This is evidence of the infiltration of capitalist values into every aspect of social life
  
   Case Study: The Late Western Film and American Empire
   
• In the late 1960’s and 1970’s, several Western films (The Wild Bunch, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and Heaven’s Gate) emerged that questioned the traditional Western narrative. They cast a negative light on (the lack of) American heroes.
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• These movies were coined as “revisionist Westerns” 
• American film makers used the Western, which is most closely identified with American myth and history to comment on the war 
• Dichotomy disappears, and conflict is reordered into one between the forces of big businesses and small businessmen trying to survive on the margins of the economy (McCabe and Mrs. Miller) 
• Anti-heroic characters (McCabe) sets standard for most bleak films during that period 
• Heaven’s Gate (1980) is sometimes credited with destroying the Western genre because of it’s unusual form, which violates many of the conventions of the traditional Western, such as it’s prologue set at Harvard University instead of the Wilderness, which was important to demonstrate the growing class divide in post Civil War America and show confidence in its new ruling class 
• Heaven’s Gate was a box office flop, which made filmmakers allergic to the genre for a while after
  
  
  
  Questions:
  
   1. What were some social changes at the time of the movie industry’s rebound? What effect did these social changes have on the generic system? 2. How does Frederic Jameson’s conclusions in his book, The Geo-Political Aesthetic, reflect the plot of The Parallax View? 3. Why is Heaven’s Gate credited as destroying the Western Genre?