Notes:
1967-1979: New American Cinema.
- Duck Soup (1933) dir. Leo McCarey
- People expect the president to come in at the top of the stairs but he comes in at the bottom
- Satyrical
- Artists and Models (1955) dir. Frank Tashlin
- Films looked like cartoons
- Bright colors and vivid imagery meant to give off that reality is fake
- Director wrote a book about a possum
- Possum hanging upside down in tree smiling
- Passerby think he is frowning because he is upside down
- People take him all over to show him the world and give him an adventure
- He doesn’t like what he sees in the world, it is scary and disgusting
- He is now frowning and the people return him to his tree, pleased because they think he is now happy
- Catch-22 (1970) dir. Mike Nichols
- One of the great movie satires
- We want you to like us scene very good show of american character, we’ll chop your children up and feed them to the fish but we really want you to like us
- Mash (1970) dir. Robert Altman
- An upside down world where the situation is almost lighthearted when nurses are operating on a man dying
- The Graduate (1967) dir. Mike Nichols
- Student floats in his parent’s pool, in a world of beer and boredom, he is expressionless
- He has an affair with one of his parent’s friends
- He walks like a robot, slumps in front of the tv, drinks beer
- The Fireman’s Ball (1967) (introduced in Episode 8) dir. Miloš Forman
- Deadpan, documentary like, making firemen look clueless and dumb
- One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) dir. Miloš Forman
- We’re in a mental institution
- Close ups, natural lighting
- The Last Movie (1971) dir. Dennis Hopper
- Challenged film style
- We are in Peru, and an american film crew is filming a western
- It seems a documentary but it really is the story
- The locals recreate characters and idols out of bamboo and treat them as if they are real
- Almost like the film is a god that has visited them
- They recreate the punch out scenes as well, but with real violence since they don’t understand it is fake
- Bright, daring hate letter to american cinema
- McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) dir. Robert Altman
- Anti western film
- Long lenses, muted colors, camera roams
- No heroes, just characters lost in snow, out of their depth and uncertain about the world
- Questioned what American history even means
- The Conversation (1974) dir. Francis Ford Coppola
- Was about the new type of sound equipment
- Professional in his lab, surrounded by his new equipment
- Accidentally eavesdrops on young forbidden lovers
- He becomes obsessed with them and their mystery, replaying the tape over and over almost to the point of a mental breakdown
- He cannot see them but the camera shows us them, in a long lens with a distant shot, the visual equivalent of the characters distance
- The movie is about becoming obsessed with small pieces of others lives, to the point where your own live dissolves
- Mean Streets (1973) dir. Martin Scorsese
- Taxi Driver (1976) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. Martin Scorsese
- About Vietnam veteran driving around in a taxi
- Filmed in slow motion, the taxi moves around in a slow ghostly way
- Motivation behind film was existentialism
- Character walks around in blue lighting, finds it painful to be alive
- When he makes a phone call, camera tracks away from character, because the moment is too painful to watch
- Chikamatsu Monogatari (1954) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. Kenji Mizoguchi
- Director kept his camera away from emotion, similar to the film above
- Raging Bull (1980) (introduced in Episode 5) dir. Martin Scorsese
- About a self destructive man
- Reaches rock bottom before finding redemtion
- Catholic boxer
- Slow motion shots for boxing scenes like christ
- Fast cuts in fights
- First time Italian Catholicism was in an american film
- Italianamerican (1974) dir. Martin Scorsese
- Same type of domestic shot as in film above
- American Gigolo (1980) (introduced in Episode 7) dir. Paul Schrader
- About a male prostitute floating through the world
- 80s red lighting
- Find grace through a woman the same way as Pickpocket
- Light Sleeper (1992) dir. Paul Schrader
- About a drug dealer also floating through the world
- Director wanting to show rescue from emptiness
- Drug dealer has revelation with the exact same shot, with a woman
- Pickpocket (1959) (introduced in Episode 7) dir. Robert Bresson
- Famous ending borrowed by Schrader
- The Walker (2007) dir. Paul Schrader
- The Birth of a Nation (1915) (introduced in Episode 1) dir. D. W. Griffith
- Killer of Sheep (1978) dir. Charles Burnett
- Director did not want it to look Hollywood at all
- Filmed in black and white
- Used grey-black music
- From kids point of view
- Put a narrative together from a lot of things he had seen
- The Shop Around the Corner (1940) dir. Ernst Lubitsch
- First great filmmakers Jewish
- Man is not hero of story, but humor and wit is the centerpiece
- Annie Hall (1977) dir. Woody Allen
- Explicitly Jewish character at the center of the film
- The joke was that New York Jewishness was foreign and unfamiliar
- Free form shooting
- City Lights (1931) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. Charlie Chaplin
- Chaplin is the butt of his own jokes, but makes the blind girl see
- Manhattan (1979) dir. Woody Allen
- A city symphony
- Widescreen images
- Again, Jewish character at the center of the story
- The Last Picture Show (1971) dir. Peter Bogdanovich
- Shows how director mixed old and new
- Black and white, conventional back and forth editing
- Country music plays
- At first look, could be a western
- But woman is dumped by a man for a woman of greater beauty, we see her sorrow
- He is too inarticulate to even say sorry
- 16 second dissolve to a wide shot of the town, now ghostly, a horrid place to live, empty
- Shows how director mixed old and new
- The Wild Bunch (1969) dir. Sam Peckinpah
- Took and stretched the neo realist idea of extending time
- Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) dir. Sam Peckinpah
- Showed how torn the director was about american history
- When Garret finally kills Billy, he quickly turns to shoot himself in the mirror, as if he cannot bear to face himself
- Badlands (1973) dir. Terrence Malick
- Days of Heaven (1978) dir. Terrence Malick
- Director studied philosophy
- Cuts between character and landscape shot
- Shows that he is, somehow, trying to capture the infinite
- Mirror (1975) (introduced in Episode 8) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
- Work has much in common with Malick
- Wind seems to be nature coming alive
- Cabaret (1972) dir. Bob Fosse
- Could be an old style musical, except musicals were not usually shot in close ups
- Director used the best of the old techniques
- Song in movie about living in the moment
- The Godfather (1972) (introduced in Episode 6) dir. Francis Ford Coppola
- Most successful upgrading of gangster movies from the 30s
- No long lenses, no helicopter shots
- “North lighting” was rare in american cinema
- Low lighting levels, shallow focus, internalizes performance
- Showed network of relationships, unlike the 30s gangster movies that followed one character
- Chinatown (1974) dir. Roman Polanski
- Shot wide screen, muted 30s color
- Private investigator unknowingly stumbles across the story of the water theft in LA, the rape of the land, where they were taking water away from farmers to fill the swimming pools
- Directors wife and family, unborn child were murdered
- Seemed to strip him of any delusions about reality
- Movie about rape, money, greed
- High point of American cinema of its time
- The Maltese Falcon (1941) (introduced in Episode 2) dir. John Huston
- Jules et Jim (1962) dir. François Truffaut
- Fleeting, lightness, expressionist