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Shocking Cinema of the Seventies
In a series of innovative articles leading critics and writers consider the social and cinematic issues which shaped the films of the decade. The volume considers film genres such as horror, the disaster movie, blaxploitation and Kung-Fu in order to discover the truth behind one of the most prolific, turbulent and challenging periods in cinema history.
252 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 4, 2016
A series of spirited essays by a bunch of assorted film- and critical-theorists, all of them erring very decidedly on the side of Left, social-analysis interpretations of their subject, and making great play with the Usual Suspects on the philosophical roster - Foucault, Bakhtin, Levi-Strauss, et al.
The book's blanket interpretation of what is 'shocking' seems to be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Encompassing everything from downbeat minority cult masterpieces like "Two Lane Blacktop", acknowledged classics like "The Godfather" and "Taxi Driver", low-budget vampire and Kung Fu thrillers, and mainstream blockbuster fare such as "The Poseidon Aventure", the epithet seems to refer to what the editors regard as the self-proclaimed revolutionary tendencies of their interpretations rather than anything which inheres in any of these films. Yet it's hardly original, and an indication of the preordained theme of this collection is clearly given in the following comment about a significant director of the period whose work was always, whatever else it wasn't, shocking:
"..on first appearance, it may seem anomalous to include a chapter on Michael Winner in a volume so heavily geared towards the positive reconsideration of seventies cinema"
Why ? Well, Winner's explicitly conservative sympathies probably exclude him from being adduced to the theory that cinema is only good if its practitioners can be presented, 'objectively' (as the Marxist cliche has it) as de facto critics of the 'bourgeois' status quo. All of which, of course, calls into question the issue of who decides what a film 'means'. The authors would probably fall back upon an auteur-based interpretation, the director serving as a conduit for the wider historical forces, contradictions, and anxieties that Marxists tell us drive everything. This rather excludes everybody else involved in the making of movies, from writers to actors to producers, and similarly ignores the fact that the contemporary concerns of both filmmakers and audiences might be rooted in other concerns than the fear of proletarian insurrection, Black Power, or whatever, which our essayists take for granted as the root of all unease.
I love films, am addicted to theorising about stuff, and am particularly fond of the 70s as a period in which many strands of thought came together and created some memorable and enduring art, in the cinema as elsewhere. But I long since tired of the reductive Left attempting to monopolise criticism of the period with its mechanical class-based interpretations, shored up by academic theorists whose ideas swiftly elaborated themselves into lunacy in the vain hope of establishing a Socialistic Theory of Everything. Sometimes, to paraphrase Freud, a story is just a story.
The book's blanket interpretation of what is 'shocking' seems to be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Encompassing everything from downbeat minority cult masterpieces like "Two Lane Blacktop", acknowledged classics like "The Godfather" and "Taxi Driver", low-budget vampire and Kung Fu thrillers, and mainstream blockbuster fare such as "The Poseidon Aventure", the epithet seems to refer to what the editors regard as the self-proclaimed revolutionary tendencies of their interpretations rather than anything which inheres in any of these films. Yet it's hardly original, and an indication of the preordained theme of this collection is clearly given in the following comment about a significant director of the period whose work was always, whatever else it wasn't, shocking:
"..on first appearance, it may seem anomalous to include a chapter on Michael Winner in a volume so heavily geared towards the positive reconsideration of seventies cinema"
Why ? Well, Winner's explicitly conservative sympathies probably exclude him from being adduced to the theory that cinema is only good if its practitioners can be presented, 'objectively' (as the Marxist cliche has it) as de facto critics of the 'bourgeois' status quo. All of which, of course, calls into question the issue of who decides what a film 'means'. The authors would probably fall back upon an auteur-based interpretation, the director serving as a conduit for the wider historical forces, contradictions, and anxieties that Marxists tell us drive everything. This rather excludes everybody else involved in the making of movies, from writers to actors to producers, and similarly ignores the fact that the contemporary concerns of both filmmakers and audiences might be rooted in other concerns than the fear of proletarian insurrection, Black Power, or whatever, which our essayists take for granted as the root of all unease.
I love films, am addicted to theorising about stuff, and am particularly fond of the 70s as a period in which many strands of thought came together and created some memorable and enduring art, in the cinema as elsewhere. But I long since tired of the reductive Left attempting to monopolise criticism of the period with its mechanical class-based interpretations, shored up by academic theorists whose ideas swiftly elaborated themselves into lunacy in the vain hope of establishing a Socialistic Theory of Everything. Sometimes, to paraphrase Freud, a story is just a story.
September 3, 2010
I'd actually probably be more likely to give this 3.5 stars, but Goodreads doesn't have half-star ratings. Bah! Anyway, this is a pretty decent collection of writings on various (mostly American) films of the 1970s from "Death Wish" to blaxploitation horror cinema. My biggest complaint with this book is the legion of distracting grammatical errors, which is a problem the book shares with its sister journal "Necronomicon." Still worth a read, but somebody get these guys a copy editor!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews