Reading 1 - Arthur Penn's 'Bonnie and Clyde': A New Style of Film - TIME Magazine [1967]
The Shock of Freedom in Films
Differing widely in subject and style, the films have several things in common. They are not what U.S. movies used to be like. They enjoy a heady new freedom from formula, convention and censorship. And they are all from Hollywood.
- Bonnie and Clyde
- Point Blank
- The Fox
Rhythm and Poetry
- Hollywood was once described as the only asylum run by its inmates.
Traditionally, in the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema, editor Jean-Louis Comolli says "a film was a form of amusement — a distraction. It told a story. Today, fewer and fewer films aim to distract. They've become not a means of escape but a means of approaching a problem. The cinema is no longer enslaved to a plot. The story becomes simply a pretext."
- No more chronological narrative, time can be jumbled on screen.
- The plot can diminish in a forest of effects and accidents.
- The purposeful camera can speed up action or slow it down.
- The soundtrack can muddle a conversation or overamplify it to incoherence.
- Black-and-white sequences intermingle with colour.
Proust is Possible
U.S. movies are now treating once shocking themes with a maturity and candor unthinkable even five years ago: the life of drug addicts in Chappaqua, homosexuality in Reflections, racial hatred in In the Heat of the Night. And The Graduate, a new Mike Nichols film, is an alternately comic and graphic closeup of a 19-year-old boy whose sexual fantasies come terrifyingly true.
No More Habit
As in the days of Goldwyn and Mayer, the studio goal is to make money — but the customers are now willing to pay for a different product. "The main change has been in audience..." argues Robert Evans (Head of Production at Paramount). "...Today, people go to see a movie; they no longer go to the movies. We can't depend on habit anymore. We have to make 'I've got to see that' pictures."
A segment of the public wants the intellectually demanding, emotionally fulfilling kind of film exemplified by Bonnie and Clyde. By now, television has all but taken over Hollywood's former function of providing placebo entertainment. Movie attendance among the middle-aged is down; yet box-office receipts are up — partly because cinema has become the favorite art form of the young.
Paving the Way
TV played a major role in paving the way for acceptance of the new in films.
Undeniably, part of the scandal and success of Bonnie and Clyde stems from its creative use of what has always been a good box-office draw: violence. But what matters most about Bonnie and Clyde is the new freedom of its style, expressed not so much by camera trickery as by its yoking of disparate elements into a coherent artistic whole:
— The creation of unity from incongruity.
— Blending humor and horror, it draws the audience in sympathy toward its antiheroes. e.g. The soundtrack adds a further fillip to the humor during the car chases; the exuberant banjo picking of Earl Scruggs playing Foggy Mountain Breakdown suggests a comedy chase.
It is, at the same time, a commentary on the mindless daily violence of the American '60s and an aesthetic evocation of the past. Yet, it observes the '30s not as lived but as remembered, the perspective rippled by the years to show that there are mirages of time as well as space. The nostalgic 'Technicolor' romanticism alters reality, distorting it as a straight stick under water appears to be bent.
Ghoulish Curio
The story has its basis in fact. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were two veal-faced 'wrongos' who rode out of Texas during the Depression, killing and plundering for fun and profit. The constabulary bushwacked them in May 1934 near Arcadia, L.A., firing a thousand rounds into the fugitives and their 1934 Ford De Luxe, which 18 years later was still touring auto showrooms as a ghoulish curio. On their own turf, Bonnie and Clyde passed from the front page into folklore; elsewhere, they were relegated to Sunday-supplement features, colorful figures of the gangland era.
Character Motives
Although Clyde is a murderous ex-convict and Bonnie is his willing, amoral moll, they are essentially innocents: violence is something they can neither comprehend nor manage, and their dreams are always of settling down somewhere when hard times are over. When the two take up their aimless career as thieves, they try to see themselves as striking back at the haves on behalf of the have-nots — although there is no hint of ideology or social protest in their actions.
Life for a Death
After the ambush of where the Barrow gang split as Buck is killed and Blanche shot in the eye, and with Bonnie and Clyde being badly wounded themselves, they escape to the sanctuary of C.W. Moss's home. C.W.'s father puts on a smarmy smile for the couple, but then arranges their execution by trading with the police: his son's life for the couple's death. The police arrange the ambush; and in what may be the most remarkable use of slow motion in cinema history, the bodies of Bonnie and Clyde writhe to earth in a quarter-time choreography of death.
Dramatic Irony
In portraying the archcriminal as the boy next door, Bonnie and Clyde displays a dramatic irony that gives the picture much of its vitality and stature. It is the irony that weds laughter and horror, belly laughs and bullets in the face, life and death.
Clyde holds up a bank — which has failed three weeks previously.
C.W. Moss's father belts him across the mouth — not for consorting with murderers but because he has got himself tattooed.
Open Checkbooks
In the wake of Bonnie and Clyde, there is an almost euphoric sense in Hollywood that more such movies can and will be made. The reason is that since mid-1966, the studios have opened doors and checkbooks to innovation-minded producers and directors with a largess unseen since Biograph moved from Manhattan to Los Angeles in 1910.
So far, the freedom given to the new filmmakers is being expended largely on "adult" themes—which means, of course, lots of sex. But more than nudity and frankness is involved. A proliferation of new techniques — multiscreen, three-dimensional, the 360° projection of Expo 67 — are already beginning to find their way into Hollywood productions.
Reading 2 - Pauline Kael's Onward and upward with the Arts: Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
- When an American movie is contemporary, like Bonnie and Clyde, it makes a different kind of contact with the American audience from the kind that is made by European films, however contemporary. (p. 150)
- The best American films always made entertainment out of the anti-heroism of American life; they bring to surface what, in its newest forms and fashions, is always just below the surface. For example, the cynical tough guy's independence, where the anti-hero turns hero.
- Bonnie and Clyde keeps the audience in a kind of eager, nervous imbalance holds our attention by throwing our disbelief back in our faces. (p. 150)
- Are these films historically inaccurate, how far can these films bend the truth for dramatic entertainment. (p. 152)
- What's ludicrous in Bonnie and Clyde isn't merely ludicrous, and after we have laughed at ignorance and helplessness and emptiness and stupidity and idiotic deviltry, the laughs keep sticking in our throats because what's funny isn't only funny. (p. 154)
- The writers and director of Bonnie and Clyde play upon our attitudes toward the American past by making the hats and guns and hold-ups look as dated as two-reel comedy; emphasizing the absurdity with banjo music, they make the period seem even farther away than it is. (p. 155)
- The "classic" gangster films showed gang members betraying each other and viscously murdering the renegade who left to join another gang; the gang-leader hero no sooner got to the top than he was betrayed by someone he had trust or someone he had double-crossed. In contrast, the Barrow gang in Bonnie and Clyde represent family-style crime. (p. 157)
- The whole point of Bonnie and Clyde is to rub violence in the audiences face to make them feel uncomfortable. However, this shouldn't be an argument against the movie (p. 161) - THIS PAGE HAS A GOOD COMPARISON OF THE MAN WHO GETS SHOT IN THE FACE BY CLYDE AND BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN
- Some people see 'Bonnie and Clyde' as a danger to public morality; they think an audience goes to a play or a movie and takes an audience goes to a play or a movie and takes the actions in it as an example for imitation. They look at the world and blame the movies. (p. 162)
- Would people imitate the crimes of Bonnie and Clyde as they may see it as glamorous, or is this Hollywood keeping their stars glamour on screen. For instance, would people still imitate this if Bonnie and Clyde were factory workers or dwarfs/obese?
- The audience are told what to tell but not about how they should feel, there is a moral ambiguity to the characters of Bonnie and Clyde
Reading 3 - Steve Neale, Murray Smith 1998 Contemporary Hollywood Cinema - "Theses on the Philosophy of Hollywood History", pp. 3-20
What is 'Classicism' in Hollywood?
Classicism may refer to certain narrative and aesthetic features (the stability of a system of genres, or of continuity principles, for example); (p. 3)
It may refer to the studio system as a mode of production. Moving out from the films themselves in another direction, 'classicism' may be said to describe a certain kind of spectatorship, one characterized by a high degree of 'homogenization' or psychic regulation.
'Classical', then, connotes not only particular aesthetic qualities, but the historical role of Hollywood filmmaking as a template for filmmaking worldwide: classical films are classical in the sense that they are definitive. Have these classic qualities paved the way for a New Hollywood?
Vertical Disintegration and Post-Fordism
The equilibrium profile of classicism - its high level of stability - will only be disrupted, Bazin argued, by a 'geological movement', as a result of which 'a new 10 pattern' will be 'dug across the plain'. Bazin's metaphor provides a way argument that the most significant development in the post-war Hollywood system is the shift away from the Fordist principles around which it had been organised during the studio era. (p. 6)
The notion of post-Fordism was coined by sociologists studying shifts in the nature of capitalist production, particularly after the Second World War when in many industries the strategies of Fordist mass-production (economies of scale through standardization and a detailed division of labour) were revised as a result ?f changes in market conditions.
The 'initial shock' of the Paramount decrees, which forced the major studios to sell off their exhibition _arms, dramatically raised the level of uncertainty [and] instability' in the market for film, Storper argues. Loss of control over exhibition encouraged the trends (already underway) towards fewer but more expensive films, and 'independent' package production. (p. 7)
Storper makes few detailed claims about the impact that vertical disintegration had upon form and style. He does, however, note that the industry responded to disintegration by intensifying product differentiation (through the introduction of widescreen etc.), ushering in a period of 'constant innovation'. This development is in keeping with the 'new pluralism of products' and 'new importance for innovation' said to be characteristic of post-Fordism more generally,and is surely at odds with a central implication of classicism: "'Classical" works conform.
One might argue that the US film industry is an example not of post-Fordism, but of industrial dualism, in which independent production companies act at once as 'shock absorbers' and research arms ('pilot fish') for the ,ajors, 'by attracting risk capital and creative talent which the majors can then exploit through their control of distribution'.
The post-Fordist argument is, then, essentially an argument about the nature of industrial organization, with,only inchoate implications about the form -of films themselves.
Post-Classicism, Neoclassicism and the New Hollyowood
The notion of 'New Hollywood' was given its academic concept of the period where Hollywood began incorporating elements drawn from Euro- pean art cinema, these films depicted uncertain, counter-cultural and marginal protagonists, whose goals were often relatively ill-defined and ultimately unattained, in contrast to the heroic and typically successful figures around which classical films revolved. (p. 10)
This 'New Hollywood'- or what David James calls the 'American art film).'- represented a trend in dialectical tension with the blockbuster films of the era, most notably the disaster film cycle. While a few 'art' films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) were very successful, many of these films were based on relatively complex narrative premises, lacked major stars, and some, like MacCabe and Mrs Miller (1971), exhibited a deliberately rough-hewn, 'primitive' quality.
The direction of the industry had been set by the monumental success of those 'hyperbolic simulations of Hollywood B-movies', Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977). Many of the features of these neoclassical 'event' movies are borne out of the horizontal integration now existing between film producers and other entertainment companies, in which films are 'designed with the multimedia marketplace and franchise status in mind'.
High-concept films are the most overtly 'market driven' films made by Hollywood, according to Wyatt. As the major film companies became absorbed within larger conglomerates, so the potential for synergies between the previously separate entertainment industries could be realised.
The influence of advertising is evident in the success of these New Hollywood films, for example, in the development of product placement, soundtrack marketing and television advertising of new releases, as well as the gleaming, over- polished visual style of directors weaned on advertising, and the substitutability among film performers, stars and fashion models.
Narrative has not disappeared, but the new technologies and new markets have encouraged certain kinds of narrative, traceable to serials, B-adventures and episodic melodramas. Given the potential profits to be made from computer games, for example, it should not surprise us that action-adventure films - like The Lost World (1997) - are perceived as potential high-earners, since their chase scenarios dovetail easily with the formats of such games. But even here, narrative is still omnipresent.
