Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
This book provides a revisionist account of the Hollywood Renaissance period by discussing (and thus memorialising) 24 directors of note who have not yet been given a proper place in the larger history of the period.
Synopsis
The collapse of the classic Hollywood studio system in the late 1960s led in part, and for less than a decade, to a production trend heavily influenced by the international art cinema and reflecting a new self-conscious in the US about the national film patrimony. This period is known as the Hollywood Renaissance - but is known largely through its so-called principal auteurs, with the relegation to increasing oblivion of those other creative voices that emerged during a period that both permitted and encouraged an American art cinema. This book provides a revisionist account of this period by discussing (and thus memorialising) 24 directors of note who have not yet been given a proper place in the larger history of the period. As we approach the 50 year anniversary of the advent of the Hollywood Renaissance (which we can conveniently date with the release of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde in September 1967 and the evaluative crisis it posed to the critical establishment), this more expansive approach to the auteurism of the period seems not only appropriate, but pressing - a necessary element of the re-evaluation of Hollywood" with which cinema studies has been preoccupied under the challenge posed by the emergence and flourishing of other media.
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