ARTES

Positioned precariously between the uptight ’50s and the freewheeling ’70s, the 1960s marked a transitional decade in the film industry. As art, mass market, and pop culture merged and collided in true pop art style, cinema swirled with psychedelic energy. This handbook gathers the best films of the era, exploring the making and the mastery of such cinematic star turns as The Leopard, The Birds, Belle de Jour, A Fistful of Dollars, and Doctor Zhivago. With audiences ever more glued to their TV sets and the loosened rules about what was “permissible” in cinema with the abolition of the Production Code, filmmakers embraced the freedom to explore the possibilities of film as an art form. As was often the case, the Europeans led the way, the French with Nouvelle Vague directors like Godard and Truffaut, and the Italians with such innovative films as Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Antonioni’s Eclipse.

The 1970s: that magical era betwixt the swinging ’60s and the decadent ’80s, the epoch of leisure suits and Afros, the age of disco music and platform shoes. As war raged on in Vietnam and the Cold War continued to escalate, Hollywood began to heat up, recovering from its commercial crisis with box-office successes such as Star Wars, Jaws, The Exorcist, andThe Godfather. Thanks to directors like Spielberg and Lucas, American cinema gave birth to a new phenomenon: the blockbuster. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, while the Nouvelle Vague died out in France, its influence extended to Germany, where the New German Cinema of Fassbinder, Wenders, and Herzog had its heyday. The sexual revolution made its way to the silver screen (cautiously in the U.S., more freely in Europe) most notably in Bertolucci’s steamy, scandalous Last Tango in Paris. Amid all this came a wave of nostalgic films (The Sting, The Last Picture Show) and Vietnam pictures (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter), the rise of the antihero (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman), and the prestigious short-lived genre, blaxploitation.