Читать онлайн "History of the motion picture" - Britannica Encyclopedia - RuLit

Before conglomeration had completely restructured the industry, however, there was an exciting period of experimentation as Hollywood made various attempts to attract a new audience among the nation’s youth. In an effort to lure members of the first “television generation” into movie theatres, the studios even recruited directors from the rival medium, such as Irvin Kershner (A Fine Madness, 1966), John Frankenheimer (Seconds, 1966), Sidney Lumet (The Pawnbroker, 1965), Robert Altman (Countdown, 1968), Arthur Penn (Mickey One, 1965), and Sam Peckinpah (Major Dundee, 1965). These directors collaborated with film-school-trained cinematographers (including Conrad Hall, Haskell Wexler, and William Fraker), as well as with the Hungarian-born cinematographers Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond, to bring the heightened cinematic consciousness of the French New Wave to the American screen. Their films frequently exhibited unprecedented political and social consciousness as well. The youth cult and other trends of the late 1960s

Fonda, Peter; Hopper, Dennis: Easy Rider (1969)Peter Fonda (left) and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider (1969), directed by Dennis Hopper.© 1969 Columbia Pictures Corporation; photograph from a private collectionThe years 1967–69 marked a turning point in American film history as Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) attracted the youth market to theatres in record numbers. (Altman’s M*A*S*H [1970] provided a novel comedic coda to the quintet.) The films were unequal aesthetically (the first three being major revisions of their genres, the last two canny exploitations of the prevailing mood), but all shared a cynicism toward established values and a fascination with apocalyptic violence. There was a sense, however briefly, that such films might provide the catalyst for a cultural revolution. Artistically, the films domesticated New Wave camera and editing techniques, enabling once-radical practices to enter the mainstream narrative cinema. Financially, they were so successful (Easy Rider, for example, returned $50,000,000 on a $375,000 investment) that producers quickly saturated the market with low-budget youth-culture movies, only a few of which—Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant (1969), Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970), and David Maysles and Albert Maysles’s Gimme Shelter (1970)—achieved even limited distinction.

Concurrent with the youth-cult boom was the new permissiveness toward sex made possible by the institution of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ratings system in 1968. Unlike the Production Code, this system of self-regulation did not prescribe the content of films but merely categorized them according to their appropriateness for young viewers. (G designates general audiences; PG suggests parental guidance; PG-13 strongly cautions parents because the film contains material inappropriate for children under 13; R indicates that the film is restricted to adults and to persons under 17 accompanied by a parent or guardian; and X or NC-17 signifies that no one under 17 may be admitted to the film—NC meaning “no children.” In practice, the X rating has usually been given to unabashed pornography and the G rating to children’s films, which has had the effect of concentrating sexually explicit but serious films in the R and NC-17 categories.) The introduction of the ratings system led immediately to the production of serious, nonexploitative adult films, such as John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge (1971), in which sexuality was treated with a maturity and realism unprecedented on the American screen.

The revolution that some had predicted would overturn American cinema, as well as American society, during the late 1960s never took place. Conglomeration and inflation did occur, however, especially between 1972 and 1979, when the average cost per feature increased by more than 500 percent to reach $11 million in 1980. Despite the increasing costs, the unprecedented popularity of a few films (Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, 1972; Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, 1975; George Lucas’s Star Wars, 1977) produced enormous profits and stimulated a wildcat mentality within the industry. In this environment, it was not uncommon for the major companies to invest their working capital in the production of only five or six films a year, hoping that one or two would be extremely successful. At one point, Columbia reputedly had all of its assets invested in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), a gamble that paid off handsomely; United Artists’ similar investment in Michael Cimino’s financially disastrous Heaven’s Gate (1980), however, led to the sale of the company and its virtual destruction as a corporate entity.

The new generation of directors that came to prominence at this time included many who had been trained in university film schools—Francis Ford Coppola and Paul Schrader at the University of California, Los Angeles, George Lucas and John Milius at the University of Southern California,Martin Scorsese" class="md-crosslink"> Martin Scorsese andBrian De Palma" class="md-crosslink"> Brian De Palma at New York University, Spielberg at California State College—as well as others who had been documentarians and critics before making their first features (Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin). These filmmakers brought to their work a technical sophistication and a sense of film history eminently suited to the new Hollywood, whose quest for enormously profitable films demanded slick professionalism and a thorough understanding of popular genres. The directors achieved success as highly skilled technicians in the production of cinematic thrills, although many were serious artists as well.