We began our examination of the 1970s by addressing filmmakers’ desire to recapture, rewrite, reshow, and understand the past, as well as how movies attempt this undertaking. Themes and questions included:
The question of personal memory vs. cultural memory.
How we try to narrativize the past and make it linear—when history, of course, is always happening in many temporal registers simultaneously, to many different people, and in many different places, all at once.
In other words, how do we represent the past?
Hindsight, that understanding accompanies historical distance, also often carries with it the tendency to simplify. With that as a given, what are the ethics of representing the past, and how is this best accomplished?
We also took on the idea of nostalgia—what is it? How do films use the past to comment on the present?
How technology and media in particular shape the understanding of our past and present.
This reordering and reclaiming of the past—especially the filmic past, via genre—occurs in a number of films at this time, including Terrence Malick’s debut feature, Badlands, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, and Robert Altman’s revisionist Western, McCabe & Mrs. Miller.
The dominance of television in the media landscape, the dire condition of the film industry at the start of the new decade, and how filmmakers and critics addressed the “threat” of television vis-à-vis film.
Screenings:
Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)
Vincent Canby’s review in the New York Times said:
Kit and Holly are directionless creatures, technically literate but uneducated in any real sense, so desensitized that Kit (in Malick’s words at a news conference) can regard the gun with which he shoots people as a kind of magic wand that eliminates small nuisances. Kit and Holly are members of the television generation run amok.
From Malick’s last interview: Though Malick paid close attention to period detail, he did not want it to overwhelm the picture. “I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum,” he said. “Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time.”
How does Holly tell her own story in the clip above? Notice how the narration, masks her boyfriend’s murderous impulses in that fairy tale language; how image making and viewing technologies shape our understanding of the self, and of the past.
(nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971)
Recall from the last class that the final image we saw was burning image of Columbia Pictures logo at the end of HEAD. Whereas in that film this immolation can be seen as biting the hand that feeds, in this film, we see another kind of deliberate destruction of the image.
Bill Simon:
In (nostalgia), Frampton is clearly working with the experience of cinematic temporality. The major structural strategy is a disjunction between sound and image. We see a series of still photographs, most of them taken by Frampton, slowly burning one at a time on a hotplate. On the soundtrack, we hear Frampton’s comments and reminiscences about the photographs. As we watch each photograph burn, we hear the reminiscence pertaining to the following photograph. The sound and image are on two different time schedules. At any moment, we are listening to a commentary about a photograph that we shall be seeing in the future and looking at a photograph that we have just heard about. We are pulled between anticipation and memory. The nature of the commentary reinforces the complexity; it arouses our sense of anticipation by referring to the future; it also reminisces about the past, about the time and conditions under which the photographs were made. The double time sense results in a complex, rich experience.
Frampton describes nostalgia as: “the wounds of returning”
The film is rife with tension between language and image in terms of representation; in making us aware of history as a living thing within us—that is to say, we put ourselves into the images, we fill them up with our own readings. Here, Frampton is concerned with making new meanings and getting rid of old ones. Or is he?
Rachel Moore has written that the film is fundamentally concerned with “betweeness”—between forms and technologies of representation; between public and private personae, and between past and present.
What is the significance of appropriated photo? Of the ending?
What is the significance of the title?
The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)
How is Bogdanovich’s relation to Hollywood’s past different than other New Hollywood auteurs?
Cinema is cast in a positive light in The Last Picture Show, while television is not. Bogdanovich sees the influence of TV as a pernicious one, and this obviously resonates with the media climate in which the film was made, wherein TV had become the dominant media form, while cinema was in a serious financial bind. In the LPS, the relationship of television to cinema is seen as a tension between individual vs community; boredom vs. engagement, and confinement vs. escape. This movie, in some ways, is about a topic that keeps recurring: the Death of Cinema.
Pay special attention to scenes that involve television. How does Bogdanovich position television via gender?
What is the film nostalgic for, exactly? Youth? A way of life? The movies? What is the relation of loss to nostalgia? What has been lost in the LPS? Old West (represented by Ben the Lion and the movies) vs. New West?
Two important scenes take place near water: pool scene where Jacy meets the urbane club kids in Wichita Falls, and Sonny and Ben out at the reservoir.
How is class portrayed? What is the role of class in The Last Picture Show?
How does the film address the idea of decay—moral, social, financial, note how decay is depicted in the state of the buildings and residences, even in the landscape? How is this different than the scene we saw in Easy Rider last week? How is it different from (nostalgia)?
How is masculinity portrayed? What does it mean to be a man? Who is in control of the sex in this town? Think of how preacher’s son, coach, Sam the Lion, Jacy’s father, etc.
American Cinema: 1960-Present 