When the Movies Mattered

In When the Movies Mattered Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis gather a remarkable collection of authors to revisit the unique era in American cinema that was New Hollywood. Ten eminent contributors, some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood movement as it unfolded across the 1960s and 1970s, assess the convergence of film-industry developments and momentous social and political changes that created a new type of commercial film that reflected those revolutionary influences in American life. Even as New Hollywood first took shape, film industry insiders and commentators alike realized its significance. At the time, Pauline Kael compared the New Hollywood to the "tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the 1850s" and David Thomson dubbed the era "the decade when movies mattered." Thomson's words provide the impetus for this volume in which a cohort of seasoned film critics and scholars who came of age watching the movies of this era reflect upon and reconsider this golden age in American filmmaking.

Introduction: The New Hollywood RevisitedJonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis1. The Mad Housewives of the Neo-Woman's Film:The Age of Ambivalence RevisitedMolly Haskell2. Antonioni's America: Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point,and the Making of a New HollywoodJon Lewis3. "Jason's No Businessman... I Think He's an Artist":BBS and the New Hollywood DreamJonathan Kirshner4. Robert Altman: Documentaries, Dreamscapes,and Dialogic CinemaDavid Sterritt5. City of Losers, Losing City: Pacino, New York, andthe New Hollywood CinemaHeather Hendershot6. The Parallax View: Why Trust Anyone?David Thomson7. Cinematic Tone in Polanski's Chinatown: Can "Life"Itself Be "False"?Robert Pippin8. "I Don't Know What to Do with My Hands":John Cassavetes's The Killing of a Chinese Bookie George Kouvaros9. The Spirit of '76: Travis, Rocky, and Jimmy CarterJ. HobermanCoda: What "Golden Age"? A Dissenting OpinionPhillip LopateAppendix: Time Line-the New Hollywood YearsNotes on ContributorsNotesIndex