Undergraduate Course: New Hollywood: American Films of the Seventies (Office of Lifelong Learning) (CLLC07002)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 7 (Year 1 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 10 |
ECTS Credits | 5 |
| Summary | This course surveys the historical and above all else artistic importance of American cinema in the 1970s, its innovations and influences.
PLEASE NOTE: This short course is offered by the Office of Lifelong Learning and cannot be taken as part of an undergraduate degree. |
| Course description |
Week 1 Martin Scorsese: The Rage Within. One critic believed Martin Scorsese¿s regular actor Robert de Niro brought something new and dangerous to American cinema. We will explore how director and actor venture into the underbelly of American life in Taxi Driver and other key films.
Week 2 Robert Altman: Attending to the Periphery. No filmmaker before Robert Altman gave so much attention to the details. From McCabe and Mrs Miller to Nashville, Altman was the great American director of the peripheral elements that create atmosphere without being forced to serve the plot.
Week 3 Alan J. Pakula: Architecture and Paranoia.In Klute, The Parallax View and All the President¿s Men, Pakula gave visual form to private fears. We will explore how the director captured an America where power seemed to be everywhere and nowhere.
Week 4 Hal Ashby: The Contempory Malaise. Whether dealing with a ¿68 election campaign in Shampoo in his mid-seventies, Shampoo, or concentrating on a returning paraplegic Viet Vet and his affair with the wife of an army officer in Coming Home, Ashby proved a great director of the emotional minutiae of the period.,
Week 5 Arthur Penn: Reinventing Genre. Penn had such a hit with Bonnie and Clyde that he became a director who could pick and choose. Yet he often worked in genre ¿ in Little Big Man, Night Moves and The Missouri Breaks ¿ but, as we¿ll show, in a way that respected the characters and the situations more than genre conventions.
Week 6 Terrence Malick: The Lyrical Mode. A great director of visual space, Malick¿s films moved slowly even in a decade where so many films eschewed narrative purpose. We will look a the visual precision of his two seventies films, Badlands and Days of Heaven.
Week 7 Milos Forman: The Insider¿s Outsider Forman was one of a number of émigré filmmakers who came to the States and managed to combine a foreign mindset with a counter cultural sensibility. Paying especial attention to One Flew Over the Cuckoo¿s Nest, we¿ll show how seventies American cinema seemed able to absorb an outsider¿s perspective whilst still allowing Forman to make a very American film.
Week 8 Steven Spielberg: Recuperating at the Box-Office. Like George Lucas, Spielberg was a filmmaker who was always more likely than most to adjust to changing times. Less a product of seventies America and all its attendant problems, Spielberg was director with one eye on the audience, and adjusted better than most to the eighties as the cultural expectations shifted.
Week 9 Francis Ford Coppola: The Hyperbolic Auteur: Few filmmakers were more ambitious than Coppola. In the two Godfather films and Apocalypse Now Coppola made the studio a fortune initially, and then looked like he might cost them a fortune when his Vietnam epic went way over-budget. Here we¿ll explore perhaps the grandest of seventies auteurs.
Week 10 Woody Allen: Comedy on the Couch. Pyschoanalysis was hardly new to cinema when Woody came along, but no filmmaker managed to incorporate it into the everyday lives of his characters, and to gain so much humour out of such unavoidably neurotic characters and situations.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | None |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- ¿ Recognise and explain the different styles of each director.
- ¿ Analyse the cultural and ideological factors influencing the creation process.
- ¿ Identify and recognize key figures in New Hollywood beyond the director. Namely the actors, cameramen and writers behind many of the key films of the decade
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Hollywood; American cinema |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Ms Martine Pierquin
Tel: (0131 6)51 1182
Email: |
Course secretary | Miss Zofia Guertin
Tel: (0131 6)51 1855
Email: |
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