Camera And Action Read online

  ELAINE M. BAPIS

  For Nick and my precious family: Often neglected but never forgotten during these last months of cure and creation.

  It takes a team to continue on difficult journeys. Thank you Bob Goldberg at the University of Utah Department of History for your consistent, critical commentary and unwavering enthusiasm for this project, despite the often tedious and overwritten drafts. Your experienced eye contributed to improvements at every stage in the process. I am grateful to Mary Strine, Eric Hinderaker, William Siska, and Rebecca Horn whose support and encouragement came unfailingly through many provocative questions and suggestions. Thank you Christine Pickett at the University for your diligence, your enthusiasm, and your excellent reading talent. Thank you Margaret Herrick and North Baker libraries. Madeleine at the Library of Congress made my research delightful.

  Part of chapter V was originally published as "Easy Rider: Landscaping the Modern Western" in The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns: Ecocriticism in an American Film Genre, edited by Deborah A. Carmichael, published in 2006 by the University of Utah Press, and is used with permission.

  As in every written project, there is a group of people that fills in the trail to publishing. For me it is the professors in the English Department at the University of Utah whose encouragement in my literary development is responsible for the beginnings of my professional life. I would like to thank Meg Brady, Steve Tatum, and Kathryn Stockton for giving me confidence in my early years. My friends and relatives offered endless encouragement; thank you for loving film with me. A special thanks to Sean Mooney for helping me keep my perspective, to Tom Harvey and Liza Nicholas for the provocative happy hours and the critical commentary, to Markle Fair for the special conversations, to Maria Mastakas and Alethia for saving me at the eleventh hour. My love of ideas began with my parents' faith in education. I am grateful for their insistence on academic learning. A special recognition goes to my father who was not able to see this completed. My deepest and heartfelt gratitude goes to my children for their patience during the most trying tasks and for their happiness over the finished product. In particular, thank you Nick, Michael, Eleni, Alethia, and Chris for always checking in and for your unwavering belief in me. Maria and Georgia, thank you for bringing such love into the world.

  Acknowledgments vi

  Preface 1

  Introduction: For the Love of Film 3

  INDUSTRY AND AUDIENCES

  1. As Hollywood Turned: Expansion, Exhibition, Codes, and Directors at Mid-Decade 15

  II. A New Audience for the Now Movie: Film Societies, the College Campus, the American Film Institute and Making Film Art 27

  GENERATION

  III. The Graduate: Representing a Generation 41

  IV. Alice's Restaurant: Constructing Hippie Folk and Legitimizing Revolutionary Distinction 61

  V. Back in the Saddle Again: Men, Westerns, Hippies, and Easy Rider 78

  GENDER

  VI. Under the Influence: Representing Masculinity in Midnight Cowboy 99

  VII. No Icon Left Unturned: M*A*S*H and the Project of Antiestablishment 114

  VIII. Out of the Saddle, into the Seventies: Gender in McCabe and Mrs. Miller 128

  IX. What's Sex Got to Do with It? Carnal Knowledge and the Delusion of Telling It Like It Is 145

  ETHNICITY

  X. Forever Native: Penn's New Authentics in Little Big Man 163

  XI. The Godfather Films as America 178

  Conclusion: Cinematic Anarchists Go Generic 204

  Chapter Notes 213

  Selected Bibliography 237

  Index 253

  This study examines the changes in the American film industry, audiences, and feature films during the years 1965-1975. With transformations in production codes, new adjustments in national narratives, a rise in independent filmmaking, and a new generation of directors and producers addressing controversial issues on the mainstream screen, film was part of the processes of social change that defined these years. Filmmakers advanced a new mantra in the business of Hollywood. Anything that was "new, now, and real" would be material for the lens and any story that went through the camera had to "tell it like it is."

  Many baby boomers thought of film as an agent for social activism concerning such issues as the generation gap, the counterculture, masculinity, women's liberation, and multiculturalism. Rather than comparing history to film and correcting data, Camera and Action places film inside historical processes. Using generation, gender, and ethnicity as categories of analysis, this work adds to the history of film as well as to the literature on representation, identity construction, and cinema as a visual site of debate.

  Ten motion pictures stand out as representations of the important role that film played for many Americans from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. The Graduate, Alice's Restaurant, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, M*A *S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Carnal Knowledge, Little Big Man, The Godfather, and The Godfather: Part II have become cinematic records of the cultural forces shaping American society during these turbulent years. Nine of the ten films have maintained an enduring legacy as icons in popular culture. The single film McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a box office flop, is included because it has maintained a critical status in academic studies and allows an important statement about the parameters of discourse at the time. These pictures memorialized a period when adversarial and unsettling narratives were a popular form of advocacy. In their success and qualified survival, each film helped define our relationship to the meaning of the late sixties and early seventies as historical reference points.

  With transformations in the American film industry and the changing composition of audiences, viewer expectations became a necessary part of the story. The Graduate (1967) staked claims of generational authority. Two years after its release, Arthur Penn turned to the counterculture to show splits within the younger generation. Penn's Alice's Restaurant (1969) exemplified the Americanness of the hippie phenomenon and its use as a site of liberation. That same year, Easy Rider (1969) arrived front and center in America to meld new counterculture men with the men of Westerns past. This experimental film registered the new taste in cinematic pleasure with its box office success and subsequent iconic status.

  When a faux cowboy and a street hustler in Midnight Cowboy (1969) entered the cinematic conversation, audiences learned of the impact of movies on male identity. The antiestablishment men in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H (1970) introduced a new image of the war hero in film. Altman returned to look at the Western's role in the construction of gender identity and authority in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). This film critiqued the genre and tested the possibility for women's equal opportunity and treatment in formula narratives. Mike Nichols turned the tables on the gender debates in Carnal Knowledge (1971) to show that not much had changed between men and women.

  Arthur Penn, in Little Big Man (1970), considered what the impact of Hollywood has been on Native American identity. His groundbreaker tried to "tell it like it was" in the old West. American cinema came full circle to the return of the genre with Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972). His "family affair" constructed Italian ethnicity as a quintessential American identity and included the European ethnic in the multicultural debates of the 1970s. The Godfather: Part II (1974) both questioned and participated in the ethnic resurgence in the larger society.

  Steven Spielberg's cinematic triumph with jaws in 1975 showed that the boomer generation could double and triple film's potential to make money. Using mainstream film as an agent in social change and experiment gave way to reformulating national narratives. Jaws, Star Wars, Rocky and others absorbed the experimental approach into classical formulas and imprinted new myths and images onto the screen for the next generation. Film as ent
ertainment-art spoke less about telling it like it was and more about how we wanted it to be. The big-draw picture had returned.

  From 1965 to 1975, film became a culture, complete with its own beliefs about how, who, and what should dominate visual reality. Viewers and critics alike talked about, thought about, and studied cinema with true faith in its sanctity. They passionately made new claims about what it could do. This book intends to show how poignant the effects of those risks were. Filmmakers and audiences documented their convictions in the lively afterlife of most of these films. The story of these ten groundbreaking films takes us through the lens and into the theaters of daily life.

  It is the nature of the claims made for the images considered as evidence that determines both the discursive function of the events and the criteria to be employed in the assessment of their veracity as predicative utterances.

  - Hayden White, "AHR Forum"

  American popular film from 1965 to 1975 underwent significant changes in infrastructure and in what mainstream motion pictures came to mean. To use Hayden White's argument about the historical in images, "the nature of the claims" viewers and filmmakers made because of these transformations had something to do with the "criteria ... employed" in assessing a historical moment when a "sixties" mentality -that is, an antiestablishment sensibility - made its way into the hearts and minds of Americans. Of the several hundred releases from 1965 to 1975, ten films in particular stand out for their discursive function and criteria in social, cultural, and industry changes. The Graduate (1967), Alice's Restaurant (1969), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Easy Rider (1969), M*A*S*H (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Carnal Knowledge (1971), Little Big Man (1970), The Godfather (1972), and The Godfather: Part II (1974) set, rejected, accommodated, and negotiated social trends. The first five pictures engaged in a sixties' generational discourse of antiestablishment. The last five joined the conversation about constructing something new in a 1970s environment of gender and multicultural debates. All ten, in one way or another, were recognized as important agents of cinematic, if not social, change through either Academy Award status or critical acclaim in academic circles, or as icons of popular culture recycled in later years. In the way viewers identified with their images, narratives, and subject matters, these pictures helped show the particular function of cinema in the production of meaning about the state of American society and culture during these years. Three discursive categories - generation, gender, and ethnicity-stand as the most prominent "utterances," articulating what film helped to imagine as socially possible then. These categories of analysis frame what was understood as vital to communicate with and therefore to live in American society.

  From 1965 to 1975, the industry's importance as a place of cultural influence, with its capital, aesthetics, and public ceremony, deepened with filmmakers and spectators worldwide. Film immersed itself in a new kind of cultural production with the Code break-up, a reconfiguration of audiences, a strong belief in film's agency to change society, and the shift of creative authority from the producer to the director. Filmmakers interested in combining experimental and expressive technique coincided with audience interest in new subject matter. The rise of independents changed the shape of Hollywood and broadened its thematic reach. Consequently, the contemporary context of the late 1960s gave filmmakers a new opportunity for success at theaters across the country.

  Where Hollywood experienced an experimental boost from 1965, the industry found its big-budget confidence by 1975. The years of transition evolved into a 1970s industry renaissance. Isolating a few films during these years highlights the "nature of the claims" produced not only in the images circulated on screens but also in the cultural survival of those films. The life of their reception has influenced the "discursive function" of these years. As one historian explains, "bombarding the public with particular images does raise eyebrows and creates many opportunities for people to think in depth about particular issues affecting modern America."'

  If film speaks to us in the present about issues in the past, it operates as a repository and a historical force, imparting the diverse ways people come to terms with the pressing concerns in everyday life. Film's "literary" quality offers an obvious chance to examine meaning, but its form, its framework of communication, is part of social processes that produce consequences. American cinema acted as an agent in the dissemination of values, beliefs, attitudes, social codes, and identity. Rather than highlighting the aesthetics, this study turns to the discursive interaction between film and its historical context. The films in this study reveal how patterns of social relations and assumptions about who we are were communicated and passed on from one generation to the next. Drawing on theories of representation and discourse, this project emphasizes film's contribution to the construction of a sixties narrative and the shaping of a seventies culture.2

  Since its entrance into twentieth-century American society, the film of Hollywood has represented the real world, taken audiences into the realm of fantasy, and challenged thought through visual inquiry. Hollywood has dominated film worldwide as an economic power and a creator of master narratives, a distributor of discourse, a negotiator of boundaries, a measure of cinematic standard, and an employer of large numbers of people. One film historian goes so far as to claim it is "one of the most visible institutions in the United States, indeed the world." This industry made itself evident in every major downtown in the 1930s movie palace days and later in every local town with the modern shopping mall multiplexes.' Entertainment has been traded for money in newspapers, magazines, fan clubs, and radio gossip, not to mention critical reviews and television talk shows.' Filmmakers have modeled after Hollywood, resisted it, or at least have become part of the conversation of film dominated by the industry.5 As one of the most powerful entities of the commercial market, American cinema produced a cultural environment measured in box office success and in the push and pull of the latter 1960s. Mainstream pictures provided a site for producing something new, something beyond the artistic innovations of previous cinematic periods and beyond the realm of film for film's sake. College-aged audiences and their professors drew an aura of mystery around the potential for film. It would be the individual medium that captured the full reality of a historical moment.

  Film, more than literature, became a communal site of liberation from establishment sensibility for many college-aged Americans. Popular motion pictures, it was hoped, would be nothing less than a tool for creating a new social "environment." As one professor told Saturday Review, "film is freed to work as ... something which does not simply contain, but shapes people, tilting the balance of their faculties, radically altering their perceptions, and ultimately their views of self and all reality."6 Movies were to be a site of intellectual inquiry, a place to reimagine the world according to the 1960s spirit of revolution, and thus a valuable social tool in change.

  Intent on breaking boundaries, with the help of new camera technology, filmmakers literally and figuratively went into the streets. Everything was a subject for cinema. American mainstream cinema would be artistic, intellectual, and profitable. In one film historian's words, the popular coincided with the intellectual to make film the "preferred arena for dissident social activity." 7 By the seventies, classical narratives dominated - but with a twist. Steamy sex scenes, new levels of graphic violence, and on-site camera work mixed with convention. A film-school generation spoke a new language on screen by the seventies and modified the previous era's idea of America itself. Instead of assuming a nation solid and unified, it was a country diverse and multicultural. A tapestry, a mosaic, a montage - these logical motifs patterned a new idea of American culture. A paradigm of diversity represented what was perceived as a purer, more authentic America.

  Such expectations of film as a social environment required a gritty realism that mirrored behavior of everyday life rather than mimicked its ideals. Like poetry for the Beats a generation earlier, film at this time became a preferred site of dissensi
on and innovation. Youth audiences had been marketed prior to 1966 with the beach party narrative, but following the censorship changes after 1965, lines between acceptability and legality created a new category: the R-rated film, which brought a newly defined market into the cinematic fold - the under-thirty young-adult group. Film now explored sensitive social issues previously reserved for avant-garde, underground, or European stock.

  The new Hollywood could not have made its way into the popular market without a new taste for the improvisation style of acting. Unknown actors and actresses such as Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross, Julie Christie, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro turned the tables on the "bankable star" era. The grittier look of this new talent fostered realism more than glitz and glamour. In an atmosphere of student protest and political demonstration, sixties film challenged American accord and changed the American persona forever. The turning point in several ways was Mike Nichols' Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966. The Academy endorsed Nichol's raw portrait of family dysfunction and brought the iconoclastic art film officially into the mainstream theater!

  It is difficult to say for sure what makes a film popular, but defining these films as such indicates something more was going on than just entertainment. Popular features belonged to a general if diverse public and one broader than the art film group because of the tie to maximum profit and dependence on large amounts of capital, even for independent projects. Hence, a film that made it to the top could echo the voice of the viewers, not merely display the vision of the director. Box-office hits, therefore, performed cultural work by speaking a popular "language" that included contentious perspectives. By virtue of their historical context, these popular films constructed America and protested at the same time. 9

  Prior to the mid-1960s, for example, big draws generally reinforced mainstream cultural values and attitudes while critiquing excessive power. High Noon (1952) condemned Cold War mentality but sanctioned typical individualist idealism. During the later sixties, with changes in the studio system and censorship protocol, mainstream film asked about the idealism itself. The feature film was a forum for both debating and reproducing identity within a range of circulating questions about Americanness and a space for negotiating new relations of power to press for wider margins of possibility.10