Independent Cinema: Crash Course Film History #12

What’s playing at the multiplex today?
Another big-budget sequel?
The same old romantic comedy?
Yet another superhero movie? ...probably that last one.
A lot of the time, Hollywood is driven by trends.
The success of one film or genre inspires others to jump on the bandwagon.
And that’s how we end up with nothing but reboots and dystopian fantasies.
The same thing happened after World War II.
Audiences around the globe were getting tired of the films coming out of Hollywood… calling
them artificial, self-important, and inauthentic.
From the Italians in the 1940s to the French in the 1960s, and even independent directors
at work today, filmmakers have found ways to challenge the classical Hollywood model
by creating their own vibrant and original films.
So let’s talk about Italian Neo-Realism, the French New Wave, and all kinds of independent cinema.
Are we going to talk about Sharknado? Nick: No. Craig: Okay good!
[Opening Music Plays]
Between the 1930s and 1950s, the major American
film studios perfected a particular style of filmmaking we call classical Hollywood cinema.
Their stories were chaste, formulaic, and mostly upbeat.
The good guys almost always won, and husbands and wives couldn’t even share a bed.
Many of the films were shot on constructed sets or the studio’s backlot.
And most used a flat, generic form of lighting called high key lighting that ensured the
entire image was clearly visible.
A lot of great films came out of the studio system, but Hollywood was churning out between
six- and eight-hundred films a year and dominating the global film market.
By the mid-1940s, audiences were ready for something new.
The first post-World War II movement to find its voice was Italian Neo-Realism.
Many of its filmmakers, like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica, were working directors
before the war and started shooting again as soon as the fighting ended.
After living through that violent time, they craved a more raw and authentic style than
classical Hollywood cinema could provide.
Filmmaking tools for these guys ran thin: Cinecittà, the film studio in Rome, was nearly
destroyed during the war, equipment was often damaged or missing, and film stock was hard
to come by.
But these resourceful Italian filmmakers found a way to turn these disadvantages into a style
that reflected the harsh reality they saw around them.
The first Italian Neo-Realist film was Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 masterpiece Rome: Open City.
Set and shot in the Italian capital just after the end of the war, the film tells the tragic
story of a handful of characters living under Nazi occupation.
Rossellini mixed non-actors with movie stars and filmed in and around buildings that had
actually been bombed.
The film has an extremely rough look, a plot that meanders from character to character,
unexpected and shocking deaths, and an ambiguous ending.
Nothing about it screams “classical Hollywood,” and that’s what helped turned it into a hit.
Other Italian Neo-Realists followed Rossellini’s example, focusing on stories that tried to
reveal the authentic suffering of everyday people.
Then, nearly two decades later, another film movement would take a different approach to
the same problem: how do you make more authentic, irreverent movies than Hollywood?
In the late 1950s in France, a group of opinionated young film lovers started writing for a movie
magazine called Cahiers du cinema.
At the time, the mainstream French film industry
was making a lot of unimaginative literary adaptations that mimicked the classical Hollywood style.
Films like Jean Delannoy’s The Little Rebels and Rene Clement’s war drama Forbidden Games.
And these young film critics hated them.
In 1959, one of their most prominent writers, Jean-Luc Godard, wrote a scathing attack on
21 major French directors.
Here’s just part of what he said: “Your camera movements are ugly because
your subjects are bad, your casts act badly because your dialogue is worthless; in a word,
you don’t know how to create cinema, because you no longer know what it is.”
Ouch.
The main argument of these critics was that the studio systems – in both the United
States and France – were spoon-feeding their audiences rather than respecting their intelligence.
Interestingly, some of the filmmakers these critics admired had worked in Hollywood
during the height of this studio system: directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles,
and Alfred Hitchcock.
And this was even before Hitchcock was Hitchcock.
At the time, he was considered a reliable maker of commercial thrillers.
Successful, sure, but not a genius.
These young French film critics, however, saw a filmmaker entirely in command of his
medium – from story to cinematography to editing.
They also admired a few contemporary French filmmakers, people like Alain Resnais
and Agnès Varda.
Varda’s work, particularly her use of non-professional actors, documentary realism, and real-life
locations, demonstrated that a vital, refreshing French cinema was possible.
By the end of the 1950s, they had analyzed a boatload of contemporary cinema, and were
ready to start making films of their own.
In 1959, four of them made their feature film directing debuts: Jean-Luc Godard shot Breathless,
Jacques Rivette made Paris Belongs to Us, Claude Chabrol made his second film Les Cousins,
and François Truffaut directed The 400 Blows.
Truffaut’s film was selected to screen at the hugely prestigious Cannes Film Festival,
where Truffaut won Best Director.
Suddenly, these scrappy young critics were being recognized as major international film
stars, and it put French New Wave on the map.
This style involved making films swiftly with minimal crews and lightweight equipment.
Like WheezyWaiter... actually no crew for Wheezy Waiter.
Advances in camera technology, along with faster film stocks, allowed them to shoot
with available or natural lighting, instead of hauling around lights.
The films’ plots often felt spontaneous and absurd, featuring tangents, casual and
irreverent humor, a frank approach to sexuality, and sometimes obscure cinematic references
and in-jokes.
French the Llama, that’s neat!
They used a lot of tricks to remind audiences they were watching a movie, to really play
with that illusion of reality – things like jump-cuts or characters talking directly to the camera.
Like WheezyWaiter.
But their goal was to capture something really authentic about life in post-war Europe.
And even though the Italian Neo-Realism and French New Wave styles got fancy names, this
shift wasn’t just happening in two countries.
New generations of filmmakers began challenging the classical Hollywood style all over the
world, from similar “New Waves” in Brazil, England, and Spain, to post-War Japanese Cinema,
and the rise of post-colonial Third Cinema movements in Africa and South America.
In a couple episodes, we’ll spend some time examining world cinema in more detail.
Meanwhile, in the United States, that 1948 antitrust lawsuit we mentioned last time – United
States versus Paramount Pictures, Inc. – forced the major studios to give up their theater chains.
Suddenly, the marketplace was theoretically open to all kinds of films, not just whatever
the biggest studios wanted to show in theaters.
The Hollywood studios were stubborn, though, and didn’t want to give up their money and
control to the tidal wave of brash, young filmmakers that was sweeping the rest of the world.
But as the 1950s rolled into the 1960s, the studios found themselves in real trouble.
Boy howdy!
After losing their theater chains, they began facing stiff competition from television.
As 1970 approached, the Baby Boom generation was coming of age, the war in Vietnam was
in full swing, American politics was at its most violent since the Civil War, and studio
films seemed increasingly out of touch.
Ticket sales were falling, and studio executives were in an outright panic.
Studio Executives like money, you guys.
So in the late 1960s, a set of films seized
the opportunity to challenge the studio system from both inside and outside.
Two New York based magazine writers; David Newman and Robert Benton
wrote a script called "Bonnie and Clyde" about a pair of charismatic depression era bank robbers
on a crime spree.
Their goal was to create an American film
in the style of the French New Wave, and in fact they almost got François Truffaut
to direct it.
Arthur Penn directed the film instead, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, and after
winning over some influential critics, it became a sensation.
With its unapologetic sexuality, casual humor, and surprisingly brutal violence, Bonnie and
Clyde was a watershed moment in the history of American film.
It was made by Warner Brothers, but the film’s success led to a cascade of independent films
– films made outside the major studio system.
In 1969 Dennis Hopper partnered with Peter Fonda to make a motorcycle road movie set
to a contemporary rock-and-roll soundtrack.
Produced on a shoestring budget, Easy Rider became a massive financial and cultural success.
In many ways, these two films – along with movies like The Graduate in 1967 and Midnight
Cowboy in 1969 – ushered in an era of surprisingly personal, idiosyncratic American filmmaking…
and proved that unique, original films could also make money.
And so could Dustin Hoffman.
At the same time, the older generation of studio executives began to retire.
They probably were okay though. They probably retired on a beach somewhere very nice.
In their place came a new crop of Hollywood decision makers who were shaped by the same
societal forces as the younger filmmakers – like the rise of the counterculture, and
Watergate-era politics.
Suddenly, filmmakers with original visions who wanted to tell risky stories could get
financed by major Hollywood studios.
And that's the way it stayed until this day. NOPE!
Directors like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian de Palma, and Robert Altman
were supported by big studios, and made films that reached an audience hungry for
something new and fresh on screen.
This window of creative control and experimentation came to be called New Hollywood Cinema and
lasted from about 1967 to 1980.
And it came to an end for a few major reasons.
Many of these New Hollywood filmmakers began working with larger and larger budgets, which
put more pressure on them to succeed at the box office.
For every Apocalypse Now – a film that seemed like a disaster that turned out to be a success
– there was a Heaven’s Gate – a film that appeared to be a sure bet that flopped
so hard it ruined a studio.
And at the same time, filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were creating movies
like Jaws, Star Wars, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Heard of 'em?
Instead of overtly wrestling with the socio-political upheaval of the ‘60s and ‘70s, these films
offered a chance to escape, a more pure form of entertainment that appealed to a wider audience.
These were the first summer blockbusters, and their unexpected success signaled a swing
away from the more risky, personal films of the previous decade.
Plus, as all this was happening, the studios were being purchased by large, multinational
corporations, which changed the way the studios worked.
...no multi-national corporation ever purchases me.
Gone were the days when a cigar-chomping studio boss decided which films got made based on
his gut instinct.
Instead, there were stockholders to satisfy, marketing departments to consult, and risk
assessments to consider.
Very corporate. Oooo, I love me some risk assessment.
Film had always been a mix of art and commerce, but this period of blockbusters and corporate
culture forever changed that balance.
The major studios spent much of the 1980s making big movies that appealed to as many
people as possible – films like E.T., Back to the Future, Die Hard, and Dirty Dancing.
And, once again, the more unusual American films had to find other funding.
The 1990s saw the arrival of a new set of independent filmmakers and mini-studios.
Directors like Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Quentin Tarantino
made films for independent companies like Miramax and New Line Cinema.
It’s not a coincidence that many of these filmmakers came of age admiring the films
of the New Hollywood Cinema.
And while they didn’t have the resources of the major film studios, the success of
films like Do the Right Thing; sex, lies, and videotape; and Pulp Fiction showed there
was still a hunger for risky, original American films that continues to today.
Today we talked about the rise of post-war film movements that reacted against the classical
Hollywood filmmaking style.
We saw the influence of Italian Neo-Realism and the French New Wave on the New Hollywood
Cinema filmmakers of the 1970s.
And we discussed the rise of the blockbuster of the 1980s and the resurgence of independent
filmmaking in the 1990s.
Next time, we’ll look at home video and how streaming services like Netflix and Hulu
are a major force in recent film history.
Crash Course Film History is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios.
You can head over to their channel to check out a playlist of their latest amazing shows,
like PBS Infinite Series, It’s Okay to be Smart, and Gross Science.
This episode of Crash Course was filmed in the Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney Crash Course Studio
with the help of these risk assessments and our amazing graphics team, is Thought Cafe.

Independent Cinema: Crash Course Film History #12

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