Happy Endings In Hollywood Cinema

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Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema

Author : James MacDowell
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 0748680187
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (486 download)

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Book Synopsis Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema by : James MacDowell

Download or read book Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema written by James MacDowell and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "e;Hollywood 'happy ending' has long been considered among the most famous and standardised features in the whole of narrative filmmaking. Yet, while ceaselessly invoked, this notorious device has received barely any detailed attention from the field of film studies. This book is thus the first in-depth examination of one of the most overused and under-analysed concepts in discussions of popular cinema. What exactly is the 'happy ending'? Is it simply a cliche, as commonly supposed? Why has it earned such an unenviable reputation? What does it, or can it, mean? Concentrating especially on conclusions featuring an ultimate romantic union - the final couple - this wide-ranging investigation probes traditional associations between the 'happy ending' and homogeneity, closure, 'unrealism', and ideological conservatism, testing widespread assumptions against the evidence offered by a range of classical and contemporary films. "e;

Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema

Author : James MacDowell
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 0748680209
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (486 download)

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Book Synopsis Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema by : James MacDowell

Download or read book Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema written by James MacDowell and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-28 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging investigation probes traditional associations between the 'happy ending' and homogeneity, closure, 'unrealism', and ideological conservatism, testing widespread assumptions against the evidence offered by a range of classical and contemp

Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema

Author : James MacDowell
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780748693825
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (938 download)

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Book Synopsis Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema by : James MacDowell

Download or read book Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema written by James MacDowell and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging investigation probes traditional associations between the 'happy ending' and homogeneity, closure, 'unrealism' and ideological conservatism, testing widespread assumptions against the evidence offered by a range of classical and contemporary films.

The End

Author : Richard John Neupert
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780814325254
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (252 download)

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Book Synopsis The End by : Richard John Neupert

Download or read book The End written by Richard John Neupert and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given the importance that spectators grant to the final moments of a motion picture, it is surprising to find so little written on how films end and how audiences interpret those closing moments. This study investigates endings in film and the lively role they play in how and why viewers make sense of movies. Relying upon contemporary literary criticism and film theory, the author analyses narrative strategies in films ranging from the classical Hollywood motion picture to the more modern European art cinema. To assist readers in understanding the various functions of endings, the films are divided into four critical categories: the "Closed Text" film, typical of classical works; the "Open Story" films; the "Open Discourse" film; and the "Open Text" film which struggles to defy story resolution. Detailed textual analysis of sample films reveal how all of the devices of filmic narration - from "mise-en-scene" to soundtracks - direct a viewer's perception, comprehension and interpretation of closure in films. Among the sample films that are featured as test cases for studying endings are "The Quiet Man" (Ford, 1950), "The 400 Blows" (Truffaut, 1959), "Weekend" (Godard, 1967), "Tout va bien" (Godard, 1972), and "Earth" (Dovzhenko, 1930). To round out his informative study of endings in films, Neupert also examines a host of diverse titles, including "Do the Right Thing" (Lee, 1989), "Open City" (Rossellini, 1945) and "The Graduate" (Nichols, 1967).

Hollywood Aesthetic

Author : Todd Berliner
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190658746
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (96 download)

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Book Synopsis Hollywood Aesthetic by : Todd Berliner

Download or read book Hollywood Aesthetic written by Todd Berliner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hollywood makes the most widely successful pleasure-giving artworks the world has ever known. The industry operates under the assumption that pleasurable aesthetic experiences, among huge populations, translate into box office success. With that goal in mind, Hollywood has systematized the delivery of aesthetic pleasure, packaging and selling it on a massive scale. In Hollywood Aesthetic, Todd Berliner accounts for the chief attraction of Hollywood cinema worldwide: its entertainment value. Analyzing Hollywood in the areas of narrative, style, ideology, and genre, Hollywood Aesthetic offers a comprehensive appraisal of the aesthetic design of American commercial cinema. "--Publisher's description.

Charles Walters

Author : Brent Phillips
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813147239
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (131 download)

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Book Synopsis Charles Walters by : Brent Phillips

Download or read book Charles Walters written by Brent Phillips and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the trolley scene in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers's last dance on the silver screen ( The Barkleys of Broadway, 1949) to Judy Garland's timeless, tuxedo-clad performance of "Get Happy" ( Summer Stock, 1950), Charles Walters staged the iconic musical sequences of Hollywood's golden age. During his career, this Academy Award--nominated director and choreographer showcased the talents of stars such as Gene Kelly, Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds, and Frank Sinatra. However, despite his many critical and commercial triumphs, Walters's name often goes unrecognized today. In the first full-length biography of Walters, Brent Phillips chronicles the artist's career, from his days as a featured Broadway performer and protégé of theater legend Robert Alton to his successes at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He takes readers behind the scenes of many of the studio's most beloved musicals, including Easter Parade (1948), Lili (1953), High Society (1956), and T he Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964). In addition, Phillips recounts Walters's associations with Lucille Ball, Joan Crawford, and Gloria Swanson, examines the director's uncredited work on several films, including the blockbuster Gigi (1958), and discusses his contributions to musical theater and American popular culture. This revealing book also considers Walters's personal life and explores how he navigated the industry as an openly gay man. Drawing on unpublished oral histories, correspondence, and new interviews, this biography offers an entertaining and important new look at an exciting era in Hollywood history.

Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing

Author : Jared Sexton
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319661701
Total Pages : 199 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (196 download)

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Book Synopsis Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing by : Jared Sexton

Download or read book Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing written by Jared Sexton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a critical survey of film and media representations of black masculinity in the early twenty-first-century United States, between President George W. Bush’s 2001 announcement of the War on Terror and President Barack Obama’s 2009 acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. It argues that images of black masculine authority have become increasingly important to the legitimization of contemporary policing and its leading role in the maintenance of an antiblack social order forged by racial slavery and segregation. It examines a constellation of film and television productions—from Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day to John Lee Hancock’s The Blind Side to Barry Jenkin's Moonlight—to illuminate the contradictory dynamics at work in attempts to reconcile the promotion of black male patriarchal empowerment and the preservation of gendered antiblackness within political and popular culture.

Troubling Masculinities

Author : Glen Donnar
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1496828593
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (968 download)

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Book Synopsis Troubling Masculinities by : Glen Donnar

Download or read book Troubling Masculinities written by Glen Donnar and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Troubling Masculinities: Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11 is the first multigenre study of representations of masculinity following the emergence of violent terror as a plot element in American cinema after September 11, 2001. Across a broad range of subgenres—including disaster melodrama, monster movies, postapocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and home invasion horror, action-thrillers, and frontier westerns—author Glen Donnar examines the impact of “terror-Others,” from Arab terrorists to giant monsters, especially in relation to cinematic representations in earlier periods of national turmoil. Donnar demonstrates that the reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across genres. Taking up critical arguments about Hollywood’s attempts to resolve male crisis through Orientalizing figures of terror, he shows how this failure reflects an inability to effectively extinguish the threat or frightening difference of terror. The heroes in these movies are unable to heal themselves or restore order, often becoming as destructive as the threats they are supposed to be fighting. Donnar concludes that interrelated anxieties about masculinity and nationhood continue to affect contemporary American cinema and politics. By showing how persistent these cultural fears are, the volume offers an important counternarrative to this supposedly unprecedented moment in American history.

The Oxford Handbook of Children's Film

Author : Noel Brown
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190939354
Total Pages : 897 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (99 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Children's Film by : Noel Brown

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Children's Film written by Noel Brown and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring cultural and social differences in defining a children's film / Becky Parry -- Screening innocence in children's film / Debbie Olson -- Screen adaptations of the Wizard of OZ and metafilmicity in children's film / Ryan Bunch -- Children's films and the avant-garde / Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer -- Intertextuality and 'adult' humour in children's film / Sam Summers -- Children's film and the problematic 'happy ending' / Noel Brown -- The cop and the kid in 1930s American film / Pamela Robertson-Wojcik -- History, forbidden games, children's play, and trauma theory / Ian Wojcik-Andrews -- Changing conceptions of childhood in the work of the Children's Film Foundation / Robert Shail -- Migrant children and the 'space between' in the films of Angelopoulos / Stephanie Hemelryk Donald -- Iranian cinema and a world through the eyes of a child / John Stephens -- The American tween and contemporary Hollywood cinema / Timothy Shary -- Growing up on Scandinavian screens / Anders Lysne -- Mary Pickford, Alma Taylor, and girlhood in Early Hollywood and British cinema / Matthew Smith -- Craft and play in Lotte Reiniger's fairy tale films / Caroline Ruddell -- Disney's musical landscapes / Daniel Batchelder -- Hayley Mills and the Disneyfication of childhood / David Buckingham -- Danny Kaye as children's film star / Bruce Babington -- Real animals and the problem of anthropomorphism in children's film / Claudia Alonso-Recarte and Ignacio Ramos-Gay -- Nation, identity, and the arrikin streak in Australian children's cinema / Adrian Schober -- Nationalism in Swedish Children's Film and the Case of Astrid Lindgren / Anders Wilhelm Åberg -- Unreality, Fantasy, and the Anti-Fascist Politics of the Children's Films of Satyajit Ray / Koel Banerjee -- Gender, Ideology, and Nationalism in Chinese Children's Cinema / Yuhan Huang -- Ethnic and racial difference in the Hungarian animated features Macskafogó/Cat City (1986) and Macskafogó 2/Cat City 2 (2007) / Gábor Gergely -- Negotiating East and West when representing childhood in Miyazaki's Spirited away / Katherine Whitehurst -- Coming of age in South Korean cinema / Sung-Ae Lee -- The Walt Disney Company, family entertainment, and global movie hits / Peter Krämer -- Reading Jason and the argonauts as a children's film / Susan Smith -- Hollywood and the baby boom audience in the 1950s and 1960s / James Russell -- Don Bluth and the Disney renaissance / Peter Kunze -- On 'love experts', evil princes, gullible princesses, and Frozen / Amy M. Davis -- Hollywood, regulation, and the 'disappearing' children's film / Filipa Antunes -- How children learn to 'read' movies / Cary Bazalgette -- Star Wars, children's film culture, and fan paratexts / Lincoln Geraghty -- Norwegian tween girls and everyday life through Disney tween franchises / Ingvild Kvale Sørenssen -- A multimethod study on contemporary young audiences and their film/cinema discourses and practices in Flanders, Belgium / Aleit Veenstra, Philippe Meers, and Daniël Biltereyst -- An empirical report on young people's responses to adult fantasy films / Martin Barker -- Disney's adult audiences / James R. Mason.

Movies and the Moral Adventure of Life

Author : Alan A. Stone
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262261189
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (622 download)

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Book Synopsis Movies and the Moral Adventure of Life by : Alan A. Stone

Download or read book Movies and the Moral Adventure of Life written by Alan A. Stone and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007-08-17 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on small art films and big-budget blockbusters, including Antonia's Line, American Beauty, Schindler's List, and The Passion of the Christ, that view films as life lessons, enlarging our sense of human possibilities. For Alan Stone, a one-time Freudian analyst and former president of the American Psychiatric Society, movies are the great modern, democratic medium for exploring our individual and collective lives. They provide occasions for reflecting on what he calls “the moral adventure of life”: the choices people make—beyond the limits of their character and circumstances—in response to life's challenges. The quality of these choices is, for him, the measure of a life well lived. In this collection of his film essays, Stone reads films as life texts. He is engaged more by their ideas than their visual presentation, more by their power to move us than by their commercial success. Stone writes about both art films and big-budget Hollywood blockbusters. And he commands an extraordinary range of historical, literary, cultural, and scientific reference that reflects his impressive personal history: professor of law and medicine, football player at Harvard in the late 1940s, director of medical training at McLean Hospital, and advisor to Attorney General Janet Reno on behavioral science. In the end, Stone's enthusiasms run particularly to films that embrace the sheer complexity of life, and in doing so enlarge our sense of human possibilities: in Antonia's Line, he sees an emotionally vivid picture of a world beyond patriarchy; in Thirteen Conversations about One Thing, the power of sheer contingency in human life; and in American Beauty, how beauty in ordinary experience draws us outside ourselves, and how beauty and justice are distinct goods, with no intrinsic connection. Other films discussed in these essays (written between 1993 and 2006 for Boston Review) include Un Coeur en Hiver, Schindler's List, Pulp Fiction, Thirteen Days, the 1997 version of Lolita, The Battle of Algiers, The Passion of the Christ, Persuasion, and Water.

A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980

Author : Robert B. Ray
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691216169
Total Pages : 422 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 by : Robert B. Ray

Download or read book A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 written by Robert B. Ray and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert B. Ray examines the ideology of the most enduringly popular cinema in the world--the Hollywood movie. Aided by 364 frame enlargements, he describes the development of that historically overdetermined form, giving close readings of five typical instances: Casablanca, It's a Wonderful Life, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Godfather, and Taxi Driver. Like the heroes of these movies, American filmmaking has avoided commitment, in both plot and technique. Instead of choosing left or right, avant-garde or tradition, American cinema tries to have it both ways. Although Hollywood's commercial success has led the world audience to equate the American cinema with film itself, Hollywood filmmaking is a particular strategy designed to respond to specific historical situations. As an art restricted in theoretical scope but rich in individual variations, the American cinema poses the most interesting question of popular culture: Do dissident forms have any chance of remaining free of a mass medium seeking to co-opt them?

The Cinema of Terry Gilliam

Author : Jeff Birkenstein
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231165358
Total Pages : 186 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (311 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cinema of Terry Gilliam by : Jeff Birkenstein

Download or read book The Cinema of Terry Gilliam written by Jeff Birkenstein and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Terry Gilliam has been making movies for more than forty years, and this volume analyses a selection of his thrilling directorial work, from his early films with Monty Python to The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnussus (2009). This collection argues that when Gilliam makes a movie, he goes to war: against Hollywood caution and convention.

The Process Genre

Author : Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478007079
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis The Process Genre by : Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky

Download or read book The Process Genre written by Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-20 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From IKEA assembly guides and “hands and pans” cooking videos on social media to Mister Rogers's classic factory tours, representations of the step-by-step fabrication of objects and food are ubiquitous in popular media. In The Process Genre Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky introduces and theorizes the process genre—a heretofore unacknowledged and untheorized transmedial genre characterized by its representation of chronologically ordered steps in which some form of labor results in a finished product. Originating in the fifteenth century with machine drawings, and now including everything from cookbooks to instructional videos and art cinema, the process genre achieves its most powerful affective and ideological results in film. By visualizing technique and absorbing viewers into the actions of social actors and machines, industrial, educational, ethnographic, and other process films stake out diverse ideological positions on the meaning of labor and on a society's level of technological development. In systematically theorizing a genre familiar to anyone with access to a screen, Skvirsky opens up new possibilities for film theory.

American Nietzsche

Author : Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226705811
Total Pages : 464 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

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Book Synopsis American Nietzsche by : Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Download or read book American Nietzsche written by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular—and surprisingly influential—figure in American thought and culture. In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's philosophy, and America’s reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read fervently, she shows how Nietzsche’s ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century, and how they continued alternately to invigorate and to shock Americans for the century to come. She also delineates the broader intellectual and cultural contexts within which a wide array of commentators—academic and armchair philosophers, theologians and atheists, romantic poets and hard-nosed empiricists, and political ideologues and apostates from the Left and the Right—drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche’s claims for the death of God, his challenge to universal truth, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring both teenagers and scholars alike. A penetrating examination of a powerful but little-explored undercurrent of twentieth-century American thought and culture, American Nietzsche dramatically recasts our understanding of American intellectual life—and puts Nietzsche squarely at its heart.

Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

Author : STEVE NEALE
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135108765
Total Pages : 361 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (351 download)

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Book Synopsis Contemporary Hollywood Cinema by : STEVE NEALE

Download or read book Contemporary Hollywood Cinema written by STEVE NEALE and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive overview of the film industry in Hollywood today, Contemporary Hollywood Cinema brings together leading international cinema scholars to explore the technology, institutions, film makers and movies of contemporary American film making.

Endings in the Cinema

Author : Michael Walker
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030316572
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (33 download)

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Book Synopsis Endings in the Cinema by : Michael Walker

Download or read book Endings in the Cinema written by Michael Walker and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-03-13 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new way of thinking about film endings. Whereas existing works on the subject concentrate on narrative resolution, this book explores the way film endings blend together a complex of motifs, tropes and other elements to create the sense of an ending—that is, it looks at ‘endings as endings’. Drawing on a wide range of examples taken from films of different periods and national cinemas, the author identifies three key features which structure the work: thresholds and boundaries, water, and, above all, the beach. The beach combines water and a boundary and is the most resonant of the key sites to which film endings gravitate. Although beach endings go back to at least 1910, they have increased markedly in post-classical cinema, and can be found across all genres and in films from many different countries. As the leading example of the book’s argument, they illustrate both the aesthetic richness and the structural complexity of film endings.

Hollywood's Last Golden Age

Author : Jonathan Kirshner
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801465842
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (14 download)

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Download or read book Hollywood's Last Golden Age written by Jonathan Kirshner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-05 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1967 and 1976 a number of extraordinary factors converged to produce an uncommonly adventurous era in the history of American film. The end of censorship, the decline of the studio system, economic changes in the industry, and demographic shifts among audiences, filmmakers, and critics created an unprecedented opportunity for a new type of Hollywood movie, one that Jonathan Kirshner identifies as the "seventies film." In Hollywood's Last Golden Age, Kirshner shows the ways in which key films from this period-including Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Graduate, and Nashville, as well as underappreciated films such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Klute, and Night Moves-were important works of art in continuous dialogue with the political, social, personal, and philosophical issues of their times. These "seventies films" reflected the era's social and political upheavals: the civil rights movement, the domestic consequences of the Vietnam war, the sexual revolution, women's liberation, the end of the long postwar economic boom, the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon Administration and Watergate. Hollywood films, in this brief, exceptional moment, embraced a new aesthetic and a new approach to storytelling, creating self-consciously gritty, character-driven explorations of moral and narrative ambiguity. Although the rise of the blockbuster in the second half of the 1970s largely ended Hollywood's embrace of more challenging films, Kirshner argues that seventies filmmakers showed that it was possible to combine commercial entertainment with serious explorations of politics, society, and characters' interior lives.