The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema's Most Celebrated Era ed. by Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema's Most Celebrated Era ed. by Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis Jonathan Hayes The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema's Most Celebrated Era Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis, eds. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 255 pp. A critical consensus defines the era of Hollywood filmmaking between 1967 and 1974 as the Hollywood Renaissance, a brief period of relatively unmatched creative cinematic output made possible by the end of both the classical studio system of filmmaking and the restrictive censorship of the decades-old Production Code. That consensus is as follow: Led by a younger generation of directors inspired by the auteurs of European art cinema, the films made during this era were groundbreaking for the American film industry due to the creative freedom filmmakers had to portray sex and violence on screen and to tell stories that would be more appealing to a new generation of filmgoers. Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis, editors of The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema's Most Celebrated Era, observe that the films of this period have "been the subject of an enormous amount of scholarly (and also of popular) writing" (xiv), and it is against this scholarship and journalism concerning such films as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), and Easy Rider (1969) that the collection's editors and contributors provide revisionist accounts. The volume opposes the grand narrative that characterizes the Hollywood Renaissance as led by American auteurs who were uniquely disruptive cinematic revolutionaries, a framework established by scholarly and popular histories including Robert Kolker's A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman and Peter Biskind's Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, and Rock-n-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. The revisionism of Krämer's and Tzioumakis's volume centers on industrial and commercial practices, creative participants other than directors such as film editors, actors, sound designers, and producers, and the science fiction photorealism created by the team of visual effects artists on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). It also shifts attention away from traditional accounts of the Hollywood Renaissance that focus on white male directors and protagonists, and instead examines dimensions of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and intersectional politics that have been largely ignored in existing scholarly and popular studies. Each of the volume's thirteen chapters focuses on a film taken as a case study. Justin Wyatt in his essay on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? notes that the 1966 film is not usually considered in discussions of the Hollywood Renaissance, yet it "truly paved the way for the Hollywood Renaissance" (13). Wyatt examines how the private relationship and public personas of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton fueled audience interest in the film, which launched a new mode of American filmmaking–"the American art film"–with its psychological realism advanced by Haskell Wexler's intimate cinematography and the screenplay's frank language adapted from Edward Albee's successful play, which directly resulted in new MPAA President Jack Valenti's decision to review and eventually abandon the Production Code. Melis Behlil examines the reciprocal influences of European cinema and American cinema on the 1970 film Zabriskie Point, focusing on MGM's distribution deal for the Michelangelo Antonioni-directed Blow-Up (1967) as setting the stage for the Italian director's work on Zabriskie Point, which the financially struggling studio financed: "By giving complete freedom to Antonioni, the studio was hoping to gain credibility with the coveted youth segment" (155). Behlil describes several waves of European influence on American studio cinema from the 1920s and 1930s onward in order to show that studios had always employed European creative talent in order to "garner prestige" (150) and that the European-influenced stylistic innovations of Hollywood Renaissance films followed this longstanding commercially driven pattern. Other contributors re-evaluate the contributions of creative artists other than directors. Editors, visual effects teams, sound [End Page 52] designers, and actors take center stage in many of the volume's essays, including Warren Buckland's piece drawing on the memoirs and interviews of film editors to examine their contributions to American cinema's new look. Buckland analyzes the work of Ralph Rosenblum on...