Hollywood Incoherent : : Narration in Seventies Cinema / / Todd Berliner.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Texas Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Berliner, Todd,
• Place / Publishing House: Austin : : University of Texas Press, , [2021]; ©2010
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (288 p.)

In the 1970s, Hollywood experienced a creative surge, opening a new era in American cinema with films that challenged traditional modes of storytelling. Inspired by European and Asian art cinema as well as Hollywood's own history of narrative ingenuity, directors such as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, William Friedkin, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, and Francis Ford Coppola undermined the harmony of traditional Hollywood cinema and created some of the best movies ever to come out of the American film industry. Critics have previously viewed these films as a response to the cultural and political upheavals of the 1970s, but until now no one has explored how the period's inventive narrative design represents one of the great artistic accomplishments of American cinema. In Hollywood Incoherent, Todd Berliner offers the first thorough analysis of the narrative and stylistic innovations of seventies cinema and its influence on contemporary American filmmaking. He examines not just formally eccentric films—Nashville; Taxi Driver; A Clockwork Orange; The Godfather, Part II; and the films of John Cassavetes—but also mainstream commercial films, including The Exorcist, The Godfather, The French Connection, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Dog Day Afternoon, Chinatown, The Bad News Bears, Patton, All the President's Men, Annie Hall, and many others. With persuasive revisionist analyses, Berliner demonstrates the centrality of this period to the history of Hollywood's formal development, showing how seventies films represent the key turning point between the storytelling modes of the studio era and those of modern American cinema.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Part I An Introduction to Narrative Incongruity -- Chapter 1 Poetics of Seventies Cinema -- Chapter 2 Narrative Incongruity in Seventies Cinema -- Part II Modes of Narration in Seventies Films -- Chapter 3 Narrative Frustration: From The Godfather to The Godfather, Part II -- Chapter 4 Genre Deviation and The French Connection -- Chapter 5 Conceptual Incongruity and The Exorcist -- Part III Incongruity’s Endpoints -- Chapter 6 Incongruity and Unity in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver -- Chapter 7 John Cassavetes’s Radical Narration -- Conclusion -- Appendix A. Best Films of the 1970s: Best Picture Awards, Critics Lists and Other Rankings, and Box Office Grosses -- Appendix B. Study of Film Incoherence -- Appendix C. Study of the Degree of Resolution of Film Endings -- Appendix D. Study of Best Picture Lists and Incoherence -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index