Books: |
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Between 1967 and 1976 a number of extraordinary factors converged to produce an uncommonly adventurous era in the history of American film. The end of censorship, the decline of the studio system, economic changes in the industry, and demographic shifts among audiences, filmmakers, and critics created an unprecedented opportunity for a new type of Hollywood movie, one that Jonathan Kirshner identifies as the “seventies film.” In Hollywood’s Last Golden Age, Kirshner shows the ways in which key films from this period—including Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Graduate, and Nashville, as well as underappreciated films such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Klute, and Night Moves—were important works of art in continuous dialogue with the political, social, personal, and philosophical issues of their times. read more |
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Featuring contributions by Molly Haskell, Heather Hendershot, J. Hoberman, Jonathan Kirshner, George Kouvaros, Jon Lewis, Phillip Lopate, Robert Pippin, David Sterritt, and David Thomson, 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 the 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. read more |
Essays: |
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| “Secrets, Lies, and Censorship: The revelation of Asghar Farhadi’s films,” Boston Review, August 14, 2024.
“How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer,” Cineaste 49:4 (fall 2024), pp. 48-49. “It Would Happen This Way: Revisiting Three Days of the Condor,” Cineaste 49:2 (spring 2024), pp. 22-25. “Naming the Unnamed War” (Bertrand Tavernier’s La Guerre sans Nom), Boston Review, March 7, 2024. “Wenders, Canonized,” New Left Review, February 2, 2024. “One False Move,” Cineaste 49:1 (winter 2024), pp. 64-65. “Le Corbeau,” Cineaste 48:1 (winter 2023), pp. 55-56. “Double Indemnity,” Cineaste 47:4 (fall 2022), pp. 64-66. “The Party and the Guests,” Cineaste 47:3 (summer 2022), pp. 61-26. “The Clockmaker,” Cineaste 47:1 (winter 2021), pp. 56-57. “Masculin Feminin,” Cineaste 46:4 (fall 2021), pp. 62-63. “The Parallax View,” Cineaste 46:3 (summer 2021), pp. 62-63. “A Very Acute Watcher: A Conversation with David Thomson,” Los Angeles Review of Books, March 2021. “Town Bloody Hall,” Cineaste 46:1 (winter 2020), web exclusive. “The Man Between,” Cineaste 45:2 (spring 2020), pp. 56-57. “Once Upon a Time . . . In Hollywood,” Cineaste 45:1 (winter 2019), pp. 49-51. “Klute,” Cineaste 44:4 (autumn 2019), pp. 62-64. “Olivier Assayas’ Non-Fiction” Cineaste 44:3 (summer 2019), pp. 44-45. “Shampoo,” Cineaste 44:2 (spring 2019), pp. 57-59. “Scenes from a Marriage,” Cineaste 44:1 (winter 2018), pp. 67-68. “Midnight Cowboy,” Cineaste 43:4 (fall 2018), pp. 58-60. “Elevator to the Gallows,” Cineaste 43:3 (summer 2018), pp. 62-64. “Dark Undercurrents: Claude Chabrol’s Second Wave from Les Biches (1968) to Innocents with Dirty Hands (1975),” Bright Lights Film Journal (March 2018). “The Stranger,” Cineaste 43:1 (Winter 2017), pp. 63-65. “Woody Allen at Eighty,” Bright Lights Film Journal (November 2015). “Passive Resistance: The Deceptive Calm of The Silence of The Sea,” Film Quarterly 69:1 (fall 2015), pp. 90-92. “The Confession,” Cineaste 40:4 (fall 2015), pp. 60-61. “Bright Lights, Timid City: The Academy Awards Celebrates Hollywood’s Conservative Business Culture,” New York Daily News Sunday, February 22, 2015, pp. 28-9. “Jean-Pierre Melville’s Noir Improvisations: Two Men in Manhattan, Les Doulos, Le Deuxieme Souffle,” Bright Lights Film Journal (February 2015). “Late, Great Chabrol,” Bright Lights Film Journal (July 2014) “The Whole World is Watching: Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool on DVD,” Bright Lights Film Journal 81 (August 2013) “When Critics Mattered: Kael, Ebert and ‘70s Film,” Boston Review 36:2 (March/April 2012), pp. 59-64. “All the President’s Men,” Film and History 36:2 (spring 2006) “Night Moves: America At Middle Age,” Film and History 36:1 (fall 2006) “Alfred Hitchcock and the Art of Research,” PS: Political Science and Politics, 29:3 (September 1996), pp. 511-13. |
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Book Reviews: |
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| “God and the Devil: The Life and Work of Ingmar Bergman,” Cineaste 49:4 (Fall 2024), pp. 71-72.
“Highbrow’s Enemy” (Review of Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation), New Left Review (February 3, 2023). “In Love with the Movies: From New Yorker Films to Lincoln Center Cinemas,” Cineaste 48:3 (summer 2022), pp. 74-75. “Mike Nichols and the American Century,” Boston Review (June 2021). “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood,” Bright Lights Film Journal (November 2020). “Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-in Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American ’70s,” Cineaste 42: 2 (fall 2017), pp. 60-72. “The Obsessions of Hitchcock, Welles, and Kubrick,” Boston Review, (June 2017) “Better Living Through Criticism,” Film Quarterly 70:2 (winter 2016), pp. 107-09. “Woody, The Biography,” Cineaste 41:3 (summer 2016) “Mad as Hell,” Cineaste 39:4 (fall 2014), pp. 76-7. “Alfred Hitchcock’s America,” Screening the Past 37 (October 2013) “An Army of Phantoms,” Cinema Journal, 51:4 (summer 2012), pp. 215-8. “Nixon at the Movies,” Film and History 35:1 (fall 2005) |
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Papers and Chapters: |
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| “Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blue, White and Red: Revisiting the Three Colors Trilogy,” Cineaste 48:4 (fall 2023). pp. 16-20.
“An Artist in Her Own Right: The Cinema of Agnes Varda,” Cineaste 46:3 (summer 2021), pp. 4-9. “Peter Yates: On Location in the New Hollywood,“ in Palmer, Pomerance, and Lennard (eds.) The Other Hollywood Renaissance (Edinburgh Univ Press, 2020). A Conversation with David Thomson, July 2020 (A Mid Century Cinema Exclusive). “‘Jason’s No Businessman . . . I Think He’s an Artist’: BBS And the New Hollywood Dream,” in Kirshner and Lewis (eds.) When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited (Cornell, 2019), pp. 51-68 (excerpts). “Introduction: The New Hollywood Revisited,” (with Jon Lewis), in Kirshner and Lewis (eds.) When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited (Cornell, 2019), pp. 1-17 (excerpts). ” ‘A Man’s Got to Know His Limitations’: The Cop Films from Nixon through Reagan,” in Friedman and Desser (eds.), Tough Ain’t Enough: New Perspectives on the Films of Clint Eastwood (Rutgers, 2018), pp. 55-74. “Who Knew it Could Get Worse? When Nixon Haunted the New Hollywood,” Cineaste 43:2 (spring 2018), pp. 30-35. “In the Dark: How Alan J. Pakula Created the Mother of All Conspiracy Movies” (The Parallax View) Slate, July 27, 2017 “The Conversation Encapsulated all of our Nixon-Era Fears,” Slate, June 22, 2017 “Subverting the Cold War in the 1960s: Dr. Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate, and Planet of the Apes,” Film and History, 31:2 (2001) |
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Audio/Visual Talks and Interviews: |
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Exact Editions interviews us about Criticism, Cinephilia, and Cineaste, November 2022 Lecture “Chinatown: The Citizen Kane of the 70s Film,” Cornell Adult University (Via zoom, movie clips deleted), November 16, 2020 Super Ficcion interviews us: “Is Hollywood in Crisis?” September 2020 Audio Interview with Movie Geeks United, on the Seventies Film, October 2019 Audio Interview on The Brad Bogner Show, about Urban Flight, December 16, 2015 Audio Interview on The Brad Bogner Show, about Hollywood’s Last Golden Age, April 23, 2014 |
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