New Hollywood - Background and Overview - Characteristics of The New Hollywood Films

Characteristics of The New Hollywood Films

This new generation of Hollywood filmmaker was film school-educated, counterculture-bred, and, most importantly from the point of view of the studios, young, and therefore able to reach the youth audience they were losing. This group of young filmmakers — actors, writers and directors — dubbed the New Hollywood by the press, briefly changed the business from the producer-driven Hollywood system of the past, and injected movies with a jolt of freshness, energy, sexuality, and a passion for the artistic value of film itself.

Todd Berliner has written about the period's unusual narrative practices. The 1970s, Berliner says, marks Hollywood’s most significant formal transformation since the conversion to sound film and is the defining period separating the storytelling modes of the studio era and contemporary Hollywood. Seventies films deviate from classical narrative norms more than Hollywood films from other eras. Their narrative and stylistic devices threaten to derail an otherwise straightforward narration. Berliner argues that five principles govern the narrative strategies characteristic of Hollywood films of the 1970s:

1. 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.

2. Hollywood filmmakers of the 1970s often situate their filmmaking practices in between those of classical Hollywood and those of European and Asian art cinema.

3. Seventies films prompt spectator responses more uncertain and discomforting than those of more typical Hollywood cinema.

4. 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.

5. Seventies cinema hinders narrative linearity and momentum and scuttles its potential to generate suspense and excitement.

Technically, the greatest change the New Hollywood filmmakers brought to the art form was an emphasis on realism. This was possible when the Motion Picture Association of America film rating system was introduced and location shooting was becoming more viable. Because of breakthroughs in film technology (e.g. the Panavision Panaflex camera, introduced in 1972), the New Hollywood filmmakers could shoot 35mm camera film in exteriors with relative ease. Since location shooting was cheaper (no sets need be built) New Hollywood filmmakers rapidly developed the taste for location shooting, which had the effect of heightening the realism and immersion of their films, especially when compared to the artificiality of previous musicals and spectacles. The use of editing to artistic effect was also an important factor in New Hollywood cinema, e.g. Easy Rider’s use of editing to foreshadow the climax of the movie, as well as subtler uses, such as editing to reflect the feeling of frustration in Bonnie and Clyde and the subjectivity of the protagonist in The Graduate. Aside from realism, New Hollywood films often featured anti-establishment political themes, use of rock music, and sexual freedom deemed "counter-cultural" by the studios. Furthermore, many figures of the period openly admit to using drugs such as LSD and marijuana. The popularity of these films with young people shows the importance of these thematic elements and artistic values with a more cinematically knowledgeable audience. The youth movement of the 1960s turned anti-heroes like Bonnie and Clyde and Cool Hand Luke into pop culture heroes, and Life magazine called the characters in Easy Rider "part of the fundamental myth central to the counterculture of the late 1960s." Easy Rider also had an impact on the way studios looked to reach the youth market. The success of Midnight Cowboy in spite of its X rating was evidence for the interest in controversial themes at the time and also showed the weakness of the rating system and segmentation of the audience.