CINE-UT 51.01 (FMTV-UT 324)
New York University
Spring 2016
American cinema has consistently positioned itself at the intersection of technology, entertainment, and art. In its first sixty years, it gradually developed into a mode of audiovisual storytelling, aesthetic experimentation, and industrial craftsmanship. By the 1960s, however, American cinema found itself at a crossroads. Much like US society, filmmakers of the time sought to formulate a variety of responses to the nation’s radical shifts in cultural identities, political values, and aesthetic conventions. Focusing on the cultural politics of race, gender, class, and political ideology, this course chronicles the sixty-year evolution of mainstream, independent, and experimental American cinema since the 1960s. We will discuss the steady decline of Hollywood and address the subsequent emergence of a cinema of experimentation, which New Hollywood had re-appropriated into the “new normal” by the late 1970s. The tension between normativity and subversion also structures our discussion of the 1980s, when independent productions challenged Hollywood’s white, middle-class, and domestic mores and, in doing so, contributed to an ideological and creative overhaul of mainstream filmmaking. We will then concentrate on the steady dissolution of this vibrant independent sector into a conglomerate studio system in the 1990s, which, in an era of reactionary politics, facilitated the conservatism of American filmmaking in the 2000s. Last but not least, we will consider the impact of the current digital turn in American cinema, in which filmmakers rely on digital effects to enhance their vision and ultimately decide to abandon celluloid altogether.
– Jaap Verheul (jcv239@nyu.edu), New York University
American Cinema 