Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema

by Todd Berliner

Overview

In the 1970s, Hollywood experienced a creative surge, opening a new era in American cinema with films that challenged traditional modes of storytelling. Inspired by European and Asian art cinema as well as Hollywood's own history of narrative ingenuity, directors such as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, William Friedkin, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, and Francis Ford Coppola undermined the harmony of traditional Hollywood cinema and created some of the best movies ever to come out of the American film industry. Critics have previously viewed these films as a response to the cultural and political upheavals of the 1970s, but until now no one has explored how the period's inventive narrative design represents one of the great artistic accomplishments of American cinema.

In Hollywood Incoherent, Todd Berliner offers the first thorough analysis of the narrative and stylistic innovations of seventies cinema and its influence on contemporary American filmmaking. He examines not just formally eccentric films—Nashville; Taxi Driver; A Clockwork Orange; The Godfather, Part II; and the films of John Cassavetes—but also mainstream commercial films, including The Exorcist, The Godfather, The French Connection, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Dog Day Afternoon, Chinatown, The Bad News Bears, Patton, All the President's Men, Annie Hall, and many others. With persuasive revisionist analyses, Berliner demonstrates the centrality of this period to the history of Hollywood's formal development, showing how seventies films represent the key turning point between the storytelling modes of the studio era and those of modern American cinema.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292737525
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	10/01/2010
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

TODD BERLINER is Associate Professor, Department of Film Studies, University of North Carolina Wilmington

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Part I: An Introduction to Narrative Incongruity
  • Chapter One. Poetics of Seventies Cinema
  • Chapter Two. Narrative Incongruity in Seventies Cinema
• Part II: Modes of Narration in Seventies Films
  • Chapter Three. Narrative Frustration: From The Godfather to The Godfather, Part II
  • Chapter Four. Genre Deviation and The French Connection
  • Chapter Five. Conceptual Incongruity and The Exorcist
• Part III: Incongruity's Endpoints
  • Chapter Six. Incongruity and Unity in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver
  • Chapter Seven. John Cassavetes's Radical Narration
• Conclusion
• Appendix A. Best Films of the 1970s: Best Picture Awards, Critics Lists and Other Rankings, and Box Office Grosses
• Appendix B. Study of Film Incoherence
• Appendix C. Study of the Degree of Resolution of Film Endings
• Appendix D. Study of Best Picture Lists and Incoherence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Editorial Reviews

This will undoubtedly become an essential book for future scholars of Seventies Hollywood.-- "Film Comment"

From the Publisher

This will undoubtedly become an essential book for future scholars of Seventies Hollywood.

Film Comment - Joe McElhaney

This will undoubtedly become an essential book for future scholars of Seventies Hollywood.
— Joe McElhaney

Film Comment