Read more
In December 1967, Time magazine put Bonnie and Clyde on its cover and proudly declared that Hollywood cinema was undergoing a 'renaissance'. For the next few years, a wide range of formally and thematically challenging films were produced at the very centre of the American film industry, often (but by no means always) combining success at the box office with huge critical acclaim, both then and later. This collection brings together acknowledged experts on American cinema to examine thirteen key films from the years 1966 to 1974, starting with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , a major studio release which was in effect exempted from Hollywood's Production Code and thus helped to liberate American filmmaking from (self-)censorship. Long-standing taboos to do with sex, violence, race relations, drugs, politics, religion and much else could now be broken, often in conjunction with extensive stylistic experimentation. Whereas most previous scholarship has examined these developments through the prism of auteurism, with its tight focus on film directors and their oeuvres, the contributors to this collection also carefully examine production histories and processes. In doing so they pay particular attention to the economic underpinnings and collaborative nature of filmmaking, the influence of European art cinema as well as of exploitation, experimental and underground films, and the connections between cinema and other media (notably publishing, music and theatre). Several chapters show how the innovations of the Hollywood Renaissance relate to further changes in American cinema from the mid-1970s onwards.
About the author
Peter Krämer is a Senior Fellow in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author and editor of eight academic books, among them The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars (2005) and the BFI Film Classic on 2001: A Space Odyssey (2010).
Yannis Tzioumakis is Reader in Film and Media Industries at the University of Liverpool, UK. He is the author of four books, most recently of American Independent Cinema: An Introduction, 2nd edition (2017) and co-editor of four collections of essays, most recently of The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics (2016).
