So this afternoon I was home sick yet again (I don't know if I've mentioned this, but I HATE summer colds!), and I watched this documentary from IFC called "A Decade Under the Influence," which is about auteur-driven cinema in the 1970s. I'm madly in love with this particular era, dating back to my 10th grade crush on the "Taxi Driver"-era Robert DeNiro, so I was really excited, even through my Sudafed fog...
And, I have to say, I was a mite disappointed. As much as it pains me to knock any documentary, let alone on a subject that I love, it left me thinking "meh...." Basically, you've got a selection of players from the film industry in the late 60's and early 70's - Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, etc. - going on about how brilliant and ground-breaking their work was. And it was, don't get me wrong...but too often this felt like a couple of dozen middle-aged white men patting one another on the back, rather than a clear-eyed look back.
We get to hear from exactly one person of color (Pam Grier), and the observation that, hey, women have voices, too! comes up 90 minutes in, for exactly nine minutes. The narrative comes off like this: Vietnam and Watergate made us all existential 'n stuff, so with the help of some high grade dope and every movie made outside the U.S. for the previous 20 years, we learned how to take the camera off the tripod. But we also made "Klute" and "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," so give us a cookie. Or better yet, a pot brownie.
Some questions...how do films like 1967's "Bonnie and Clyde" and 1969's "Midnight Cowboy" get roped into the 70's auteur era? How does Watergate (happened 1972, blew up 1974) influence a film made years earlier? Why is Sam Peckinpah, a studio guy from the 50's on, considered to be part of this cohort? Why, again, am I expected to swallow the opinions of a bunch of middle-aged white men on the Civil Rights movement, feminism, etc.? How, exactly, does "Easy Rider" explore these themes???
There's a good discussion of how "Jaws" and "Star Wars" introduced the idea that films could be marketed nation-wide (rather than building an audience city by city), and that a film could make more money through product licensing than through the box office. But I really wished there'd been as much exploration of the era's beginning as there was of its decline. What we're left with is the idea that the end of the studio contract system suddenly led studio heads, en masse, to take chances on Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern and Peter Fonda. Why? Because they're so damn cool, that's why!
In every film textbook and Intro to Cinema class in this country, you hear about the brilliant work produced in the late 60s and 70s. And I don't deny that - some of my favorite films came out of that period. But the popular storyline ignores the fact that this set of films embodied themes that were relevant largely to one demographic: middle class white men for whom the post-World War II social movements left them confused about the state of their privilege. Women, ethnic minorities, the lower classes and people who don't do drugs or wife-swap were as voiceless in Hollywood as they always had been, and to an extent still are.
"A Decade Under the Influence" is a nice primer of films from that era, but I really could have used more criticism...
UPDATE: After this, I bumped "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" to the top of my queue...It's an hour shorter, way more thorough and a million times less pretentious. You'll hear more about the role of people like Robert Evans, who *hired* the brilliant auteurs, and about the excesses (drugs, over-budget films that nobody wanted to see, etc.) that did way more to bring down Bogdonavich, Hopper & Co. than "Jaws" or "Star Wars" did. Highly recommend.
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