NONWESTERN FILM PRODUCTION

In the postwar era, directors outside the Western tradition for the first time brought their regional perceptions and concerns to an international audience.

Japan

From Japan came Akira KUROSAWA, who opened a door to the West with his widely acclaimed Rashomon (1950), an investigation into the elusive nature of truth. His samurai dramas, such as The Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), Yojimbo (1961), Kagemusha (1980), and Ran (1985) were ironic adventure tales that far transcended the usual Japanese sword movies, a genre akin to U.S. westerns.

India

The Indian film industry produces more feature films than any other nation in the world for a vast population of movie goers. While most of these films follow clear and cheap formulas, the problems of an India in transition have been vividly brought to life in the quiet and reflective films of Satyajit RAY particularly in the trilogy Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), and The World of Apu (1958).

Third World

Many other nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have begun to produce films, primarily for their own regions but occasionally for the international market. Cuba dominates the Latin American cinema, with a vast government-funded film school and studio. Its most distinguished director has been Tomas Gutierrez Alea (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968). With the loosening of political restrictions, the Brazilian and Argentinian cinemas emerged in the 1980s with such films as Hector Babenco's Pixote (1981) and Kiss of the Spider Woman, (1985) and — among many others — Fernando Solanas's Tango (1986).

In the 1980s, films from the People's Republic of China began to circulate throughout the West. Other East Asian films include those from Hong Kong, most of them of the kung fu variety.

AMERICAN FILM OF THE 1960s and 1970s

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the American film industry accommodated itself to the competition of this world market; to a film audience that had shrunk from 80 million to 20 million weekly; to the tastes of a primarily young and educated audience; and to the new social and sexual values sweeping the United States and much of the rest of the industrialized world. Major Hollywood studios became primarily offices for film distribution, and were often subsidiaries of huge conglomerates like Coca Cola. (A decade later, however ownership began to move overseas, notably to Japan, where the Sony Corp. bought Columbia and Matsushita purchased MCA.) Hollywood began to produce far more material for television than for movie theaters; and increasingly, films were shot in places other than Hollywood. New York City, for example, recovered its early status as a filmmaking center.

American movies of the period, from the beginning of the Kennedy presidency to the era of Watergate, moved strongly into social criticism (Doctor Strangelove, 1963; The Graduate. 1967: Bonnie and Clyde, 1967: 2001: a Space Odyssey, 1968; The Wild Bunch, 1969; MASH, 1970: McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 1971: The Godfather, 1972; The Conversation, 1974; One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1975). Challenging the traditional norms and institutions of American life — law, order, decency, and sexual purity — these films searched for spiritual meaning in an American society that had become entangled in Viet Nam, enslaved by the rigidly institutional and merely material. The collapse of the 1930 Hollywood Production Code and its 1968 replacement by the Motion Picture Rating System (G, PG, PG-13, R, and X), which indicated the level of audience maturity each film demanded, was an effect of these new themes. The X rating proved unworkable, and in 1990 was replaced by a new label, NC-17 (no children under 17).

The most successful directors — Stanley KUBRICK, Robert ALTMAN, Francis Ford COPPOLA, Woody ALLEN, George LUCAS and Steven SPIELBERG — were those who played most imaginatively with the tools of film communication itself. The stars (with the exception of Paul NEWMAN and Robert REDFORD) were, for their part, more offbeat and less glamorous than their predecessors of the studio era — Robert DE NIRO, Jane FONDA, Dustin HOFFMAN, Jack NICHOLSON, Al PACINO, Barbra STREISAND, Diane KEATON, Meryl STREEP.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 854