Movie Mavericks: Creativity, Crisis and Change in 1970s Hollywood - Essay Example

Teacher Movie Mavericks: Creativity, Crisis and Change in 1970s Hollywood The aim of this research report is to closely analyze twoseparate film histories of 1970’s Hollywood cinema while simultaneously contrasting and comparing them with each other. This research seeks to understand how the histories provided by Hillier (Forty years of change: Hollywood from the 1940’s to the1980’s) and Elsaesser’s ‘Notes on the unmotivated hero; the pathos of failure; American films in the 70’s’ come to highlight different aspects of the film industry yet equally maintain their statuses as ‘histories’ and not simply perspectives. Hillier’s ‘Forty years of change: Hollywood from the 1940’s to the 1980’s’ attempts to document the half century of Hollywood change as an industrial revolution. Hillier’s conclusion results from the assumption that Hollywood is, asides being a provider of entertainment and producer of art, fore mostly an industry. He gives various reasons and his basic evidence points to Hollywood’s money making ability. Even in times of economic crises, lack of creative or artistic productivity, the movie business was continuing on and unlike other businesses, moving towards a more financially secure future. Hillier’s history seems to serve a dual purpose. He seeks to simultaneously present facts but uses them to argue for a specific point of view. The nature of it is at best, subtly didactic and openly persuasive. Facts are not simply being related to us but a particular viewpoint is systematically being dictated – Hillier does this within a particular rhetorical and linguistic framework. Hillier’s language is also sharp and edgy as the money making Hollywood is, in his view. He works to establish that the foremost function of Hollywood is to maintain its existence through a financially built foundation. He gives various examples to illustrate this using the help of the history of government policies of the era. What led up to the industrious success of Hollywood cinema in the 1970’s is the back story of how the monopoly of studio’s was broken down by government restrictions and eventually led to the independent production houses. The narrative that is produced in this way is that of struggle for survival and a battle between binary forces; the studios and the government. Hillier presents the history in the format of an epic battle, with adversaries and crippling circumstances on all sides. The falling economy due to the two World Wars, the government restrictions acting as a dictatorship, and the rival disruptive, clever American film productions abroad are portrayed as all contributing to the apparent downfall of the star studios. This narrative itself is very epic, very emotionally evocative. Here we find ourselves more deeply entrenched into the rhetoric of ownership and possession. However, as the text continues, the narrative transforms to one of more peaceful and compromising times. Hillier writes, “After the consent decrees and divorcements, all the majors were still powerful as distributors and, while continuing as producers (even if on a diminished scale), all remained crucial as sources of finance, albeit usually of co-finance” (Hillier 9). This sentence plays a crucial role in the continuous strand of the text. The epic narrative is brought to an end as a solution of compromise, where the damage done has been taken into stride and yet surpassed. Thus the majors managed to salvage the remnants of their lost film dynasty and remained crucial players of the game. The two clauses in this sentence show Hillier’s refusal to disregard the majors in the history of the Film industry. The impositions of the phrases ‘even if on a diminished scale’ and ‘albeit usually of co-finance’ showcase that the fallen heroes were still the majors, and significantly responsible for the shaping of the Hollywood film business as an industrial entity. Hillier introduces three paragraphs explaining the effects of independent production and the mechanisms that underlay it’s working. These new introductions changed the face of cinema production. With the coming of these independent production houses also came newer species of film workers who were agents fundamentally, but with much more acquired power and managerial control. Hillier portrays this as a negative uprising, almost as though the undeserving lower class had wronged the rightful aristocracy. But nonetheless, the majors were financially secure at this point in time and thus managed to maintain a powerful stance. With the coming of new laws and incitements, they were no longer the monopoly of production houses but had now moved to a more subtle control of the film business: its finance. And so the battle for reign of Hollywood moved onto different fronts. Hillier alters the narrative once again and this time talks of a guardianship of the industry. The majors were now no longer in the limelight but continued to watch from afar, intervening where ever they thought fit to intervene. The majors are now given the archetypical role of shunned protectors, those who maintain a loyalty to what they believe is their own divine right. Hillier argues from this viewpoint and seeks to consistently remind us of this at every turn. The agents and other government instituted cronies were indeed flittering through the scenes but were still being kept at bay. “However, given the crucial role still played by the majors… we should not overestimate how much freedom became available”(Hillier 9). thus a check to the rampant individuals was still being given. Hillier fits this line in at the end of the paragraph as a reminder of who exactly we should be supporting through this. The insertions of such sentences throughout Hillier’s historical analysis continuously juxtapose the history in motion with the consequences of the state of the majors. Hillier uses the government policies and the changes which they brought about in the film industry as an external opposition to the otherwise thriving industry of the majors. Here, by giving us the facts set in archetypical narratives and within formats of the wronged, lost, yet never completely destroyed heroes, Hillier situates the film history within a framework of battling entities for control. This is a different mode altogether from the earlier assertions of the text that the change in Hollywood was one of industry. The industry only resulted from the battles being fought within the republic. The industry was the only natural outcome, we are implicitly told. The film empire, with the changes that were being hurled at it, now was an industry gaining strength. And the appeal is that we consider the majors as the good guys and lend our sympathy to them. Hillier goes on to discuss the majors and their relation to the television, to the growing communication business, and its eventual sustainability in the industry as a major controlling power. Here he deals mainly with the facts and restrain somewhat from any facticity in his interpretation. But his conclusion, after the historical telling of the story of the majors, plays out this: “By the mid 1980’s, the majors had demonstrated that movie production was still profitable, and the business was still essentially in their control.” (Hillier 17) And so the history that Hillier gives us is exclusively, a tale of the majors and how they were thrown out from their own cinematic lands yet managed to surpass these difficulties and maintain control nonetheless. Elsaesser goes a completely different route with his own 1970’s film history. He attempts to follow the changing trends in American cinema, specifically in the 70’s era through the perspective of the thematic changes that occurred (or didn’t occur). His thesis seems to be that American cinema has continued following the same themes that have always occurred so as to remain representatives of wholesome ‘American –ness’ and its subsequent experiences. Yet the twist is that American cinema has always remained deeply subversive, at a level which few have been able to penetrate. And this has been done at the underlying ideological structure of filmography. Though he clearly says that his history is selective and thus exhibits bias, we know that this is another rhetorical strategy, one which claims not to be objective and thus licensed to evaluate without the external contexts. This is quite the deconstructive approach that Elsaesser employs and defends throughout his account. By narrowing down his film selection, Elsaessar subtly defines the discourse that he uses to highlight the central core of 70’s American cinema; the anti-hero and failure tropes. He focuses on microelements of subversion in order to illustrate his view of the definitive American history of that era. He writes that certain elements of cinema had introductory elements that “neutralizes goal directedness and warns one not to expect an affirmation of meaning and purposes.” (Elsaessar 14) This was what laid the basis for existentialism in movies which can be followed right into current day cinema. Elsaesser goes on to talk of the two main opposing concepts that showcase themselves in 70’s cinema. The “the tension between existential allegory and documentary naturalism” is what the thematic battles were all about. This is what drove the film plots and narratives. The underlying assumption was that these were the pathos of the ordinary American and the undertaking of the film industry was to satisfy these feelings. The catharsis that resulted of movies which were produced in this era came to define trends which would eventually follow. Elsaesser juxtaposes the history of American society with the history of its cinema as reflective processes of each other. The underlying theory here is that nothing exists in isolation and thus the cinematic content history is only the mirror of what has been happening in American sub culture. Hence, this history situates itself clearly in the epoch created by social theory. And so, in his own structural style Elsaesser does the same. Throughout his historical analysis, he invokes the names of numerous films and characters to illustrate his argument. Similarly, these same films also illustrate the state of the American audience at the time as well as the reception that these films get. What Elsaesser is essentially documenting is the sociological movements that ran through the 70’s and the period leading up to it, being documented within the transformations of the mythical archetypes of heroism and life journeys. Considering the Hillier focuses too much on the majors, and though there are times in history when the majors take on a passive role, he refuses to let them leave the limelight. On the other hand, his foregrounding of the majors as a central force in cinema allows for a spider web format of history; all events are traced back to the position of the majors. Elsaesser focuses on the content and the history of the evolving themes of the era, and exactly what they were a product of. He traces the trajectory of the tropic advancements and uses them to illustrate a fundamental experimental nature in Hollywood cinema. The downside is that he completely neglects that which Hillier stressed most upon; the role of the government and economy in the shaping of those tropes. It can be argued that the effects of these bodies are themselves manifested in the content and therefore one can derive insight to them in this manner. Writing film history is not an art, but the analysis of the histories provided by Hillier and Elsaesser do go a long way in exhibiting the creative processes behind them. The perspectives and techniques used by both are technically and theoretically sound yet have their share of strengths and weaknesses. All in all, both together form crucial truths of the 1970’s Hollywood cinema. And when read together they posit meaning onto each other as mutual discourses entrenched in the same era. Work Cited Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 70’s’ Monogram Vol. 6 1975 Hillier, Jim. ‘Forty years of change: Hollywood from the 1940’s to 1980’s’. The New Hollywood 1992 Studio Vist Read More