The public relations department here at Mid Century Cinema is delighted to announce that When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited, will be published by Cornell University Press this June. It features a veritable dream team of contributors (you can click on the links below for author IDs).
From the Jacket Copy:
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.
The Contents:
Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis, Introduction: The New Hollywood Revisited
Molly Haskell, The Mad Housewives of the Neo-Woman’s Film: The Age of Ambivalence Revisited
Jon Lewis, Antonioni’s America: Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point, and the Making of a New Hollywood
Jonathan Kirshner, “Jason’s no businessman . . . I think he’s an artist”: BBS and the New Hollywood Dream
David Sterritt, Robert Altman: Documentaries, Dreamscapes, and Dialogic Cinema
Heather Hendershot, City of Losers, Losing City: Pacino, New York, and the New Hollywood Cinema
David Thomson, The Parallax View: Why Trust Anyone?
Robert Pippin, Cinematic Tone in Polanski’s Chinatown: Can ‘Life’ Itself be ‘False’?
George Kouvaros,“I Don’t Know What To Do With My Hands”: John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
J. Hoberman, The Spirit of ‘76: Travis, Rocky and Jimmy Carter
Phillip Lopate, What ‘GOLDEN AGE’? A Dissenting Opinion
Timeline—The New Hollywood Years